KFin Technologies and CAMS, the two registrar and transfer agents for the mutual fund industry, have joined hands to launch an interoperable investment management platform.
Investments in India’s mutual fund industry have surged in the last few years. At the end of August, the total assets under management of the mutual fund industry stood at Rs 36.59 lakh crore. However, there is no one particular way to invest in mutual fund schemes. Some do it through distributors, some do it directly through offices or websites of individual fund houses or there are a few digital fintech platforms that have emerged in recent years dealing in mutual fund investments. You could also invest through your stock broker. Some mutual funds are serviced by KFin Tech and others by CAMS. Service requests too have to be submitted separately to individual fund houses.
Market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in July said there was a need to set up a common mutual fund transaction platform, which could make it convenient for investors to transact and avail of services without knocking the doors of multiple offices or platforms.
KFin Tech and CAMS in association with the Association of Mutual Funds of India (AMFI) have launched a portal MFCentral. “Today the industry as a whole is evolving from being product focussed to actually being service focussed,” said Madhabi Puri Buch, whole-time member of SEBI.
MF Central is a one stop platform for mutual fund investors to transact across the industry.
“The first phase, going live today, covers non-commercial transactions (service requests of investors), financial portfolio view, and consolidated account statement among other features. The next two phases will see the launch of a mobility platform, financial transactions, and integration with ecosystem partners for several value-added services,” KFin Tech and CAMS said in a joint statement.
The objective of this initiative was to develop a step change in ease of doing business not just for the investors but for everyone participating in the industry, including the asset management companies (AMC), the intermediaries and the regulators, said Sreekanth Nadella, CEO of KFin Tech.
“It is time that we lay foundation for a highly secured, resilient and hyper scale infrastructure that is required to meet the exponential growth that this industry has seen and is going to see in the ensuing years. It is also important that we create an information super highway, provide the best in class analytics for the regulator to regulate, for AMCs to create solutions as well as for the investors who would actually make the wealth proposition. It would also rationalise redundancies in industry’s efforts and costs,” said Nadella.
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This platform will be available free of cost to users. You can sign into the website by providing your registered mobile and PAN number. In the first phase, you can get a consolidated view of your mutual fund holdings. So far, only service requests such as changes in your profile and personal details like contact info and bank account details, nominations etc have been enabled. A mobile app will follow in phase two and in the third phase investors will be able to make commercial transactions and investments. Distributor logins along with their associated services will also be rendered in the third phase. All the phases are expected to go live by the end of 2021.
“This is probably the first initiative of such nature in the entire world. No where, mutual fund industry, regulator and the MF ecosystem have come together to provide this facility and service to customers,” said Nilesh Shah, MD and CEO of Kotak AMC and chairman of AMFI.
