Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund's strength lies largely in its fund-management capability and people across all its business verticals. Apart from this, we also derive our strength from the Aditya Birla Group brand and a long-standing track record.
Distribution expansion continues to remain an area of focus in our endeavour to increase the market share. We are stepping up our engagement with partners in various ways to provide value-added services. In this process, we not only conduct seminar and events but we have also institutionalised the activities and calendared them to make it a continuous exercise.
Challenges ahead
The biggest challenge would be coping with the pace of evolution being witnessed in the digital area. We are also seeing a revolution coming in our way in the same space around the payment-banking mechanism. Our responsibility remains dual - to take care of the interest of both customers as well as distributors.
Unknown variables have been increasing in a complex global financial-market environment. Complexity in the global economy needs to be thoroughly analysed and understood in order to form a portfolio-construction strategy. It is also becoming extremely important to keep an eye on risk metrics and monitor them.
CompetitionI am always of the opinion that there is enough space for more players, given the under-penetration that exists in the mutual fund industry, as long as they are able to stay committed in developing this market through innovation. I also believe that over time net-based or online-based transactions would go up manifold after seeing the development in payment banking. Mutual fund accounts could go up significantly once the industry begins using the IT platform aggressively in building customer base through simple product solutions.
Retail reach
In the last three years, the overall retail contribution to our business has been growing at about 20 per cent. Our focus on building the customer base through multiple strategies, including the JTTM (jaanoge tabhi toh maanoge) initiative, has resulted in an increase in folios as well as new PAN numbers. In the last two years, we have added close to five lakh new PAN numbers into our family. We expanded footprint through our Branch Expansion as well as Market Representative Model (MR). We have created our presence through the MR model in about 30 more locations to have an aggregate branch network of about 120 and 30 MR locations. With these activities, our overall target is to double customer base folio from 27 lakh to more than 50 lakh in the next two years. By 2020 we would gun for 1 crore customers. Sometimes I feel this number will be over-achieved, given the technological revolution that could come in the financial-service industry, especially for mutual fund investing.
This article was originally published on November 17, 2015.
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