Pune IFA Vipul Shah, of Bigbucks Finserve initiated 283 SIPs amounting Rs.7.01 lakh on April 25. Conducting an SIP drive themed around retirement, Vipul advised his clients to accumulate retirement corpus through systematic investment plans.
Initial journey
Though a CA by qualification, it was investments instead of taxation and accounting that interested Vipul. So after CA he pursued an MBA and CFA and entered equity broking. Soon he realised that there was limited financial literacy among people and this offered a huge opportunity for financial advisory services. He then decided to take the leap and started Bigbucks Finserve in 2010. He has acquired over 1,500 clients ever since, accumulated assets of around Rs.84 crore and holds an SIP book of close to Rs.1.2 crore.
How it all started
A regular reader of Cafemutual, Vipul got the idea of a running an SIP drive while reading about IFAs logging in impressive SIP numbers in a single day. To make the investment message more powerful, he decided to attach the goal of ‘retirement planning’ to it. According to him, a client is likely to ask: ‘Why should I invest for your SIP login day?’ According to Vipul, pitching retirement as the goal takes care of that ‘why’ and makes it an easier sell.
Execution of plan
Vipul and his team started planning for the SIP day from the first week of April. As Vipul wanted an online process, the team identified clients having registered NACH mandate on NSE NMF II platform. From the list, he shortlisted clients in the higher tax bracket with only a small SIP investment. The idea was to increase the client wallet share by targeting clients who were underinvesting (compared to their financial ability). Overall, the team identified around 700 clients who fitted the criteria.
Vipul then assigned around 200 clients to each of his four team members. The team prepared a customised retirement goal sheet for each client based on inputs from them. The sheet calculated the amount required by the client to comfortably manage his/her monthly expenses post retirement as well as the SIP investment necessary to achieve the goal. After sharing the retirement sheet with his clients, the team members along with Vipul contacted each client over the phone and explained the importance of retirement planning. In case the clients were already investing for their retirement, they urged them to top up their investments to make up for the shortfall.
Overall, 100 clients participated in the SIP drive, activating 283 plans worth Rs.7.01 lakh thus bringing the average SIP size close to Rs.3,000. Most of the applications were completed online through NSE NMF II while around 20 SIPs were done offline.
Enthused by the success of this SIP drive, Vipul plans to run another SIP marathon during the festival season. This time he plans to theme it around financial planning for children.
