When Ahmedabad based distributor Ankit Chopra read about Prakash Hegde’s feat of creating 300 SIPs in single day on Morningstar, he made up his mind to punch in 500 SIPs in one day. He shared this idea with his father Omprakash Chopra, who started a sub-broking firm in 1990s.
Ankit Chopra (L), Omprakash Chopra and Ankur Chopra (R).
His father had ventured into mutual fund distribution in 2007. Since equity broking had been dematerialised, his experience in mutual funds was not so good. The amount of paperwork involved in mutual funds at that time discouraged him. Thus, he kept his focus on broking.
After 10 years, his son Ankit realized the potential of mutual funds. He observed that operational hurdles related to KYC and form filling have eased a lot now. This nudged him to renew the mutual fund license and hit the ground running. By reaching out to existing clients, Ankit and his team built a mutual fund book of Rs 7 crore in barely 10 months. Ankit has a legacy of 2,000 direct equity investors.
His brother Ankur who looks after operations and research along with the team played a pivotal role in creating 651 digital SIPs today. Ankur and his team set out to achieve this target in May 2017. Reaching out to existing direct equity investors and organising investor awareness programmes, or IAPs, helped them achieve this ambitious target. Since many of his direct equity investors are aware of this asset class, bringing them into MF fold was easier. Besides, they reached out to new clients through references. A lot of these prospects were investing in PPF for tax saving. Ankit explained them the benefits of ELSS which helped him get SIPs in tax saving funds.
They executed these transactions through BSE StAR MF platform. “We used the bulk upload feature to punch in these SIPs. All these SIPs are registered online. We had set out to achieve 500 SIPs but we exceeded our target. This would not have been possible without the help from my team and BSE StAR MF. Majority of these SIPs are for 10-20 years tenure across 125 investors,” said Ankit.
Their team has generated a SIP book of Rs 17 lakh with average ticket size of Rs 2,600 per SIP. Encouraged by the success, they are aiming at building mutual fund book of Rs 500 crore in the next seven years. Ankit said he will ride the digital wave, conduct IAPs and aggressively transition his direct equity investors into mutual funds to achieve this goal. Their firm has built a website by the name of fundsmitra which allows investors to start investing online.
This story is a shining example of how adopting technology can help advisers achieve scale and efficiency.
This post is authored by Ravi Samalad.
