The drop in assets under management of the mutual fund industry to sub-Rs 5 lakh crore levels has led to a flurry of activity in the mutual fund industry towards wooing investors.
This time around, there are a lot of investor friendly plans on the anvil. Soon, investors in the country will able to glance at dividends declared by asset management companies (AMC) on the website of the Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi).
AP Kurian, chairman of Amfi, said, "In the next 10 days, investors will be able to look at the dividends declared by their funds. We were receiving several queries that; people are sometimes not aware of what dividends they get from different schemes. So, now, with all the other details of the fund, we will be also providing dividends on the Amfi website."
He was speaking on the sidelines of the 6th Annual Conference on Capital Markets in Mumbai.
Amfi is also in process of launching a common platform for mutual funds transactions, which will facilitate transactions like buying and selling schemes.
The mutual fund industry, at the moment, is going through testing times. The withdrawal of funds by the banking sector has seen most of the big asset management companies report depleted AUM numbers. Among the top five houses, only HDFC Mutual Fund has seen an increase in the AUM in March.
Additionally, the MF industry also faces a big asset-liability mismatch. UK Sinha, chairman of UTI Mutual Fund, mentioned that the industry acquired 75-80% of its resources from short-term avenues, and then invested these in long-term loans to corporates.
"This is not a healthy trend," he said, adding that it could lead to an asset-liability or maturity mismatch. That too, when banks can withdraw money parked with mutual funds within 24 hours.
Nimesh Shah, MD of ICICI (ICICIBANK.NS : 360.7 +11.35) Prudential MF, said, "In the current scenario, profits of AMCs have vanished." Shah also pointed out that fund houses are facing problems in selling their equity schemes in "such volatile market conditions".
He also said that distributors have started selling other products along with MF.
Overall, there are approximately 60,000 distributors selling MF schemes, and number is decreasing over time.
Many markets players also sense that given the trying times, it is very difficult to convince investors to enter equity schemes.
Fund houses also expressed concern about the continuous low penetration in the urban areas at the conference.
"Last month, over 60,000 systematic investment plans (SIP) were registered with our AMC. 60% of these were from non-metros."
"We had seen tremendous redemption pressure in the month of October and November last year, as over a lakh crore were redeemed from various schemes. However, now it seems that everything is falling in place and once the markets start their positive rally, we will witness some ease in the MF industry," concluded Kurian.
No comments:
Post a Comment