From left: Srinivas Jain, ED, SBI Mutual Fund; Mohit Goel, Director—Marketing, Digital and Direct Channel, Exide Life Insurance; Manish Shah, Co Founder and CEO, Big Decisions; Prashant Kapoor, Vice President (New Initiatives), Outlook Money; Govind Rajan, COO, FreeCharge
The digital medium, when it comes to consumption, has opened several contradictions. On one hand people are comfortable to transact on purchases but on the other the same isn’t the case when it comes to making financial decisions. In fact the entry barriers in case of investing are a put off for a prospective investor and keep them away from actually investing. Manish Shah shared his experience on how the aggregator business was doing good to get a platform that allowed access and there was a big market where people weren’t searching well, say, like the health space. The panellist agreed that it was difficult to clearly proportion how much business was completely from the digital channels as most transactions still take place physically.
Mohit Goel shared his experience on how it was getting clear to all to have a dedicated social team, which needs to handle any social media backlash smartly. His advice: have a fulltime digital response team ready, which should work towards solving the problem than getting into confrontation. Srinivas Jain detailed the need of digitisation in the mutual fund industry, adding, the biggest challenge faced by the industry was communication. At the same time, he shared his views on why a complete digital delivery in mutual funds is still a long way to go. The low value, high frequency transactions on which several platforms thrived was something that Govind Rajan felt was changing, but for it to get meaningful for financial products, differentiation is all vital, he felt. The panelists agreed that over the next few years they would see about 20 per cent of their business coming from the digital route.
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