I heard a few things – and since I hear many things in many such summits – I don’t always understand what it means. Just understanding that I do not understand.

Our chief said that there is concentration risk – the top 7 fund houses hold 70% of the assets.

Does that not happen in EVERY industry? do the top few not dominate the industry? Colgate has 50% of the toothpaste industry, Coke and Pepsi have eliminated all other players, Gillette has a huge market share, Suzuki has more than 50% of the passenger car market.

This is bound to happen. I have no clue what is the risk, and I did not understand what he plans to do about it!

Simple solutions are available – have a TER cap on fund houses with more than Rs. 150,000 crore aum. Or put a TER cap on the institutional aum. Of course the manufacturer’s lobby will not like it. Rather the manufacturer’s lobby will NEVER favor it, because it is run by the biggies…but let a solution emerge sir, we will take it forward, let there be 20 players with 5% market share. You tried that in the brokerage business, right? is it working? I know not.

He said that there should be healthy competition:

I have never understood this healthy competition. Motor cars did not compete in a very healthy way with the horse carriage. Mobiles did not compete healthy with landlines. Airtel, Vodafone, …and others just annihilated Mtnl, bsnl,…and now Jio is annihilating Airtel and Vodafone. Jet airways used all the dirty tricks to kill Indian Airlines. Jet, Kingfisher….ruled. Now Indigo is killing Jet Airways. Since I don’t understand healthy competition, i will let that pass.

Deepak Parekh said there should be no foreign tours. Very sensible. We waste too much foreign exchange on it anyway. All players should be forced to do R and R tours to North East. Oh no infrastructure? Good. Let us raise money in infra funds and create infra in NE and then do our R n R….what say? All you need is to create hotels which will let 4000 people stay..at the same time.

He also said that there should be more women in the bfsi space. I agree, and we should all start at home. 30% of aum should be from ARN belonging to women. Catch is her father, husband, brother, son…..should not be an ARN holder. What say?

He also said that we should do something to attract talent. Best way to kill the mf industry is to make them top heavy and fixed cost heavy. So kill the IFA and take on 1000 more employees in each zone in each mutual fund. Awesome way to kill the industry. I have no clue how to attract talent. If you are an IFA less than 35 years of age, I think it requires guts to do a 25 year projection for your own retirement.

We need Paytm. No Paytm is not a threat to the IFA. It is a threat to the Mf industry. He could be the 45th mutual fund – and he might concentrate on liquid funds. If he does well, he will compete with RBI, not with the IFA.