‘It’s a fallacy that all online plans are direct’
MUMBAI:IN India investor education and awareness is still low, says Sanjay Sapre, president, Franklin Templeton Investments. “We should not expect customers to always make the right decisions. Some level of technology support is required,” he said. Sapre, spoke to Htmoney on how technology is going to help investors and how you should invest. The question is whether the customers want to pay for the advisory separately or the customer wants a bundled commission product. There are three models online where a customer can get advice. Model one is DIY or do-it-yourself. If you are a selfdirected investor with time and knowledge, you can opt for this option. The second model is purely automated or robo-advisory. These models are not as popular for the human psyche – ‘a machine can tell me what to do but I may not do it.’
The model that is now emerging is ‘phygital’. Some of the players are offering phone-based support services. The entire process can be online but you also have the option to reach out to a human.
A purely online model, a faceless or nameless model, has not really picked up yet. It is easier to collect an advisory fee online. The only way it probably makes the process cheaper is that the client won’t have to spend on travel to a fund house’s branch. Removing those inefficiencies can drive some cost benefits in the system. In a scenario where a robot advisory is set up, it is the ability to get advice from chat support or phone which makes it easy. A pure robot advisor with no human touch has not been successful. In the back-end, something that is coming up is robotic processing, which replaces repetitive and standard tasks humans do. Dynamic analytics and personalisation is another space where AI will be used to study customer behaviour and do a bit of handholding. Technology in various forms is a critical enabler of growth. For example, we wouldn’t have managed ₹7,000 crore of SIP flows had the system not been digital.
But in a country like India, where investor education and awareness is still low, we should not expect the customers to always make the right decisions. Some level of technology combined with human support is required.