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    New Aadhaar-based e-KYC to help in seamless onboarding of customers: Ganesh Ram

    Synopsis

    ‘It is a blessing for for distributors and investors’

    Ganesh Ram BSEET Now
    A lot of people are coming in and we are also preparing some manuals and video-based demos for people.
    We are going to try and make life much more simpler for the IFAs, says Business Head – Mutual Funds at BSE.

    How is e-KYC really benefiting investors during this lockdown time?
    If you actually look at the mutual fund lifecycle, KYC is part of onboarding, transaction, payment and customer service. KYC really required a digitisation or some kind of automation to help the distributors or industry to onboard customers well. From a transaction point of view or from a payment point of view, a lot of digitisation has been done but our regulator kind of helped us now. He used to introduce e-KYC, which is going to be really helpful in onboarding the customers. Today if you look at the KYC process, it is quite complex and there is a lot of paperwork. So BSE’s e-KYC is going to be based on Aadhaar and then the video IPV; just based on the regulation which Sebi has prescribed. So it is going to immensely help our people to onboard the investors quickly. In a market situation where you need to time the market, quickly onboarding new investors is going to be much easier and efficient.

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    What has been the response since launch?
    The response is fabulous. A lot of people are coming in and we are also preparing some manuals and video-based demos for people to understand things. It is a blessing for people, particularly for distributors and investors because they normally used to do KYC externally and mostly physically. In this current situation, they really needed a market player like BSE to come and do an online digital KYC. So the response is fabulous as of now.

    What have been the steps that you have really looked at in order to avoid client drop outs?
    In a situation when you have this kind of market volatility and the current Covid situation, the expectation is obviously that the market has gone down. So there are some investors and distributor concerns over the market conditions and the dropout is expected to happen. But if you look at this as an opportunity, we introduced a lot of back to back digital services. You talk about e-KYC, the distributor common empanelment, which is a digital initiative, the POS SAP, which was very much in demand by investors and the distributors.

    So on this scale if you look at the brokerage which we launched, we kind of now ensure that people know there are some value adds, which is the first bid. The second is, in the last few months or so, we did around 150 webinars, which is a training-based or Zoom-based training. We even did it in vernacular languages. I think this condition is something which is out of control but what we kind of realise is that this is the right time for distributors and investors to understand how the digital world is. This is the right time for us to keep them updated and onboard themselves. If on an average, we onboard 15 IFAs from physical to digital every day, it is a significant number and we are continuously doing it. So it is taking advantage of this. We understand that the situation is out of control and there will be dropouts but how to make use of it and use this time to educate people on digital and keep them ready so that once the market is up, which is going to be very soon, we already see some optimism in the industry. So once the order is back, it will be much easier to transact.

    Give us a sense of the subscription and redemption amount that has been contributed by Star Mutual Fund.
    Overall, I think the market fell around 25-28%. I am just comparing May to March. So there was a 20% drop but if you look at May and April, redemptions significantly about 40% have cooled off, which is good news. There is a steady inflow in SIP; whereas from 20% of transactions, we have come down to 7% compared to April. The value of the transaction, if you look at the average SIPs, at BSE Star is around Rs 3,500 crore to Rs 3,800 crore; that has significantly come down to around Rs 2,700 crore. But the inflows have reduced; so the downfall or the decline of the inflow has improved from 20% to 7% and redemption by around 46% has stopped, which is a good sign. But June is going to be very critical. With relaxation of lockdown, there is also some optimism in the market for June and July. The quarterly results are also going to come out in July. So we believe the numbers will improve, which is already proven when we compare April and May.

    The mutual fund industry has been channeling all their transactions online due to the lockdown. How has BSE Star MF been able to contribute?
    Our share is around 40% now. We have crossed around 36% now, which is significant compared to last year but we are continuously doing a lot of webinars and connecting with people across India. We onboard around 15-18 IFAs who have been doing physical transactions onto our platform. Out of those 15 people, at least 10 people transact and the other five people just get a feel of it and understand it. So going forward, when the lockdown opens and the physical starts taking form, how this industry is going to react is something which we are curious about.

    But looking at the last one month’s response, what we got from our IFAs, this really pushed them to adopt digital. Challenges continue to be there but probably in a month or so from now, we will see a lot of digital adoption and BSE Star is one of the key contributors of this. Not only as a mutual fund transaction platform but as a value addition. They are doing eKYC and we are giving brokerage management, we will do SIPs that are going to be Aadhar-based e-mandate. We will go live this week or next week. We are going to try and make life much more simpler for the IFAs. So we are now onboarding and contributing big time to the industry.




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    (What's moving Sensex and Nifty Track latest market news, stock tips and expert advice, on ETMarkets. Also, ETMarkets.com is now on Telegram. For fastest news alerts on financial markets, investment strategies and stocks alerts, subscribe to our Telegram feeds .)

    Download The Economic Times News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.

    Subscribe to The Economic Times Prime and read the Economic Times ePaper Online.and Sensex Today.

    Top Trending Stocks: SBI Share Price, Axis Bank Share Price, HDFC Bank Share Price, Infosys Share Price, Wipro Share Price, NTPC Share Price

    ...more
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