Ashwani Bhatia, Managing Director and CEO of the SBI Mutual Fund, said that there has been 27 per cent growth in the industry in past four years, while the growth of banking sector is only 12 to 15 per cent.
While talking to ‘The Pioneer’ here on Wednesday, Bhatia said that with the growth in the economy, financial sector grows maximum and mutual fund grows with fast pace.
This is global trend. With the increase in financial literacy, people would move away from bank to asset management, he added.
To a query, Bhatia said that SBI Mutual Fund is the safest among other products in the market.
He further said, “We believe in ‘SLR’- Safety, Liquidity and returns. Customers are quite happy with us. We have an extensive research, which is the best.”
He stated that at present there are 12 branches of the SBI Mutual Fund in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and soon we would have two more branches.
We “believe that the places where the SBI have regional offices, there should be our office,” he added.
Talking about his companies much sought after schemes, Bhatia stated that SBI Bluechip, SBI Small Cap and SBI Focused equity are quite popular among the customers and with this SIP flow is increasing fast.
We hope that in next two years, IPOs would the SBI Mutual Fund would be issued.
The conventional investment practice was in gold and real estate. But the mutual fund is the fastest growing market now and people are going away from the conventional methods.
There are several benefits of the mutual funds including taxation, indexation and capital appreciation, he said, adding that the SBI Mutual Fund has strong distribution network in the country. Recently, the company has added 6,600 new Independent Financial Advisors (IFAs), he added.