ICICI Prudential regional head Kumar Abhishek, Bihar, Jharkhand & Chattisgarh has said that despite the fact that the Mutual Fund (MF) industry is one of the best regulated sectors in India, people having a MF portfolio in India comprise of less than three per cent of the Indian population. He said that there is a need to spread greater awareness among investors on different avenues.
“ICICI Prudential is making a sincere effort to move investors towards right funds at right time and help investors move away from selecting products based on short-term performance and look at important parameters like fund house pedigree, consistent long-term performance and risk management. Retail investors often tend to look at the past performance. While past performance is only a threshold for selecting funds, concept selling drives investors to the right product for next 2-3 years” noted Kumar.
Addressing a press conference, he said : “ Today there are more than 4.8 crore investor folios and around a crore of these are in SIPs. Total industry size is around 14 lakh crores and growing participation from retail investors and huge inflows in equity schemes led to an increase in the mutual fund (MF) industry’s assets base during the quarter of April-June. Inflows into systematic investment plans (SIPs) for equity schemes have been rising.The monthly SIP book has risen to nearly 3000 Crores per month from 1800 crores in March 2015.Besides, mutual funds added nearly 7.85 lakh investor accounts in the first two months of the current fiscal, taking the total number of folios to a record 4.84 crore”.
He noted that ICICI Prudential is the largest mutual fund company as per assets under management data available (Rs 199560.54 lakh crores as on 30 June 2016).