Dramatic and far reaching changes…

  If you are a shareholder who started an asset management company and /or a life insurance company hoping to make money, God bless you! For those of us who are shareholders with the Birla, Hdfc, Tata groups – remember we are all funding the insurance and mutual fund businesses indirectly. Kotak bank, Hdfc ltd, [...]

MBA: Job opportunities!

Is the financial service industry doing anything for society? I mean is there a VALUE ADD or is it just getting more and more out of the value adding channel? Not sure? Ask MBA colleges – the financial service industry is a big saviour. Whether it be ICICI, Hdfc, Kotak, Indiainfoline, – all their arms [...]

Debt Market lessons

Training as a CA has many advantages (and a few disadvantages perhaps). One of the advantages is you get sceptical about numbers, and you get to question conclusions/views drawn from numbers. I remember one life insurance company giving me their settled claims to received claims ratio. Smartly it included maturity claims, investment products, pension plans….suddenly [...]

Ulips : Irda wins turf battle with sebi

In what was being seen as a turf battle between sebi and irda, the winner as of now seems to be Irda. It shows the power of the people in the life Insurance business. Now if you have LIC, SBI, Hdfc, Icici, …each with a few ’000 crores of stake in the insurance business and [...]

Breaking news: Bad news from an amc!

If you have been in the equity markets for 30 years you have some advantages. First you have seen many players come and go. You keep wondering how many are genuine, how many are fake. Over this period you classify people into platinum, gold, silver, …and of course mud. Fund managers also come in various [...]

Financial Services: Very profitable Industry!

For a minute forget what the various parts of the financial services industry is telling you. The profitability of this industry seems to be fantastic. Let us take 4 parts of the industry: a. Banking: Over the years the biggest and the richest fortunes have been made by bankers. No doubt about it. Goldman Sachs, [...]