Attended the Cafemutual Confluence – it is still going on – and I am posting from the venue.

The first round was the fund manager round which was chaired by Vivek Law and the speakers were Naren Sankaran, Prashant Jain and Anoop Bhaskar.

The problem with such an august panel is most people are intimidated to ask any questions. However Naren made a valid point – most distributors are scared of selling a scheme when it has recently taken a hit. Well he did not say it in so many words, but he said at the current interest yields (G sec very close to 2 digits!) the only reason that the IFAs are not selling debt funds is because of the July effect. Agreed Naren.

Also Prashant made a point that when all mutual funds are open ended funds why do IFAs not sell when the market is low?

Simply because Mr. Prashant Jain the IFA does not OWN the customer. The customer listens to Mr. Vivek Law, Mr. Dhirendra Kumar, on TV, reads many newspapers, magazines….and makes up his own mind. When things go right, he thinks it is his brain and when things go wrong he blames the IFA.

The second session was ‘how to increase the mutual fund pie’ – nice topic, but it spoke about mis-selling and the Moderator asked ‘since the world’s cheapest pension plan is the NPS, why do you distributors not sell the NPS’. Simply Mr. Gautam Chikermane the IFA has to make money to run his house, and NPS does not pay. If the distributor had an organisation backing him, pay him a Rs. 50 Lakh salary to do investor education, he would do that.

The other speakers were Lovaii Navlakhi, Neeraj Choksi, Rajiv Bajaj and Vishal Kapoor. I have heard of Lovaii and Rajiv, but I do not know the others. By the way the topic centered around mis-selling by the IFA….

Well I heard it…..

Wealth management for the non-urban non-elite households by Puneet Gupta was being moderated by Gautam Chikermane….