Read Mahesh Vyas in Financial Express on SEBI's new initiative on transparency requirements for people selling mutual fund products. For background reading, see: link, link. I have two comments here:
- The debate about transparency in the relationship between the customer and the mutual fund agent reminds me about the debate which took place a long time ago on the transparency in the relationship between the customer and the BSE broker. In the bad old days, when you purchased shares, the BSE broker gave you a consolidated bill for the consideration which you had to pay. You were not supposed to ask what was the actual execution price at which shares were bought and what was the markup charged by the broker. It was as bad as buying a currency forward from a bank.
Thanks to SEBI's pushing, transparency came into the contract note of the BSE broker: today the contract note clearly shows the price at which the share was bought on the market and the markup charged by the broker. The same can and should be done with mutual funds. - The second dimension is the extent to which the mutual fund agent is conflicted. I feel the mutual fund agent must be required to first show the customer a tariff card containing the fee earned by him on all the various products that he sells. This will help the customer have an better perspective on what advice is being given out.
And, Mobis Philipose has an article on the unique governance challenges of financial exchanges. I have long argued that profit-oriented and valuation-focused exchanges present difficult problems, particularly given the weaknesses of the legal system and regulation in India. See: link, link.
It seems like a good idea to me that Mobis and Ajay right a joint paper or research article on governance structure of Commodity Stock exchanges. Its ironic that commodity exchanges have got much more potential of affecting common man's life for the better, but they get too little attention. Besides lower comparative trading volume, one reason might be that articles about commexes are not in-general lucid enough and sound too 'expert' like.
ReplyDeleteThanks Ajay, It will definitely be helpful to all of us to get a clear look of what changes are happening recently.
ReplyDeletethis is the nice information shared with us.