In a first-of-its-kind succession planning in the financial advisory space, three IFAs Amit Bivalkar of Sapient Wealth, Pune, Paresh Kariya of Aargus, Mumbai and Pallav Bagaria of Brand New Day, Guwahati have merged their practices to form Sapient Wealth.
The combined AUA of the new entity adds up to Rs.3,000 crore. Also, Sapient Wealth will now have five directors including Janak Shah and Rahul Khandekar.
Talking to Cafemutual, Bivalkar said that the merged entity would help reduce costs and grow business: “Commissions have come down post TER rationalization. Also, as the industry grows, there will be pressure on commission structure. In such a scenario, advisors should look at ways to reduce costs to keep their business growing. And what is better than working together to share costs and leverage each other’s expertise.”
He further said, “Since we work in different geographies, there will be no conflict in terms of servicing clients. Also, with this merger we will surely complement one another. While I have expertise in debt, Paresh understands private equity and structured products. Pallav has experience in running a business efficiently. We are from a similar school of thought; I call this a marriage of minds rather than a merger of businesses.”
Seconding Bivalkar, Bagaria said that the merger would help their clients get better services. “Individual IFAs do not have the bandwidth to hire talents like national distributors and banks. However, with this merger, we will create quality manpower to provide better technology, compliance standards and research to our clients,” he said.
According to Bivalkar, these are the key benefits of this merger:
- Get new ideas and innovative ways to grow business
- Reduce costs by sharing various expenses – execution platform, software, back-end operations, customer communication, and so on
- Grow business by adding new verticals like call centre and centralized service centre
- Offer new products, which require higher ticket size such as AIFs, PMS etc.
- Presence across geographies
Cafemutual raises a toast to the new beginning with big dreams!
