Aditi Kothari Desai is a director on the board of DSP Investment Managers Private Limited (DSPIM). She leads e-business sales and marketing and is a member of the company’s executive committee.
Desai joined Merrill Lynch’s investment banking group in New York in 1998, working primarily on mergers and acquisitions. Subsequently, she worked at DSP Merrill Lynch in the fixed income sales team and later joined DSP Merrill Lynch Fund Managers (now DSPIM) in 2002.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. She is also an independent director of Godrej Agrovet.
She is passionate about watching and saving wildlife and is a trustee of the Hemendra Kothari Foundation and the Wildlife Conservation Trust. She sits on the board of directors of the Indian philanthropic foundation DASRA.
In an interview with Forbes Advisor India, Desai spoke about his passion for educating investors and his commitment to building consumer trust based on integrity.
What is your vision for your business?
My vision for the company is to be the most trusted company for which we need to ensure that we invest our customers’ and investors’ money in the best way possible by focusing on the right products at the right time. and good advice. to the right person.
I want to help distributors get the right products to the right customer. For an 85-year-old man on a pension, I’d rather he didn’t get a very high-risk fund, even though he really wanted to. So my idea is really to build trust, the strengths will follow; confidence comes with performance and doing the right thing.
We are a very different family business. I have 150 years of a name, which I want to carry another 150 years. Confidence is the one thing that has kept us alive for 150 years and will carry us through the next.
Do you think investment firms really need to reach out to consumers given the heightened interest in stock markets?
There are two aspects to this. Investment management companies must reach out to the end consumer for education. There are over two million individual investors in this industry, that’s 20 million. We don’t have the bandwidth to serve them all from a consulting standpoint. So obviously digital comes into play to be able to do that. And I’m very much in favor of digital, but not everyone is comfortable with digital.
Second, when it comes to the physical, we are dependent and very happy to have good mutual fund distributors in the middle to serve investors. However, my role must be to educate mutual fund distributors, to educate the RIAs who take a commission from the client and to educate the end client so that he asks the right questions of his adviser and our distributors.
If the investor goes to the distributor only to buy units of a fund, he must be advised on the type of fund, the right time and somewhere to be sure that his money is being managed in the right way. And when the distributor gives him the name of a fund, he’s comfortable with that name, after all, it’s their hard-earned money.
So I think the whole industry has a responsibility to constantly communicate with the end customer in the right way and the market regulator has done a wonderful job of mandating investor education.
Where do you see the differentiator between new era companies and veteran investment companies? How do you correlate this to the Indian ecosystem?
I don’t see DSP as a seasoned company, I think we are a new age contemporary company. We are way ahead in our digital evolution and we are still at 1.0. There is a lot of development, a lot of reflection.
There are two things about digital: one is making sure that your processes, your products, your technologies are great, and the second is really trying to get the customer to use digital in a way that can ease the burden on their Service Advisor or Distributor and help them do things themselves, and yet take the advice from the Advisors they need to take it. Or if they choose not to have an adviser, digital is something that can hold their hand, and we need to be responsible enough to be able to do that and be kind of a real robo-advisor, if necessary.
Yet people will still need to hold hands and I think the reason for this is that people don’t really start earning enough money to invest substantially until they are maybe 40-45 years old. So the money is still sitting on the 50s, 60s, 70s, and they’re still not as digitally savvy, especially to transact online. So maybe digital, in terms of wealth, technology hasn’t taken off as much yet.
Thirty-somethings in 10 years would be forty-somethings, and today thirty-somethings are very comfortable with digital technology. In fact, in our own digital platform, we have about 65% under 50. So I think digital adoption is generational and I think there are incumbents in this field that need to embrace digital. I haven’t seen any new fully digital mutual funds.
What makes you feel independent?
I am autonomous, but more than that, what gives me energy is that I love my job. What energizes me is knowing that I’m making a difference in the lives of my investors, either by educating them or by making sure I’m doing everything I can to make sure that they have the best investment experience and build their wealth. in every possible way. And if someone is disappointed, I would like to educate them further.
Investing is a matter of patience; partners need to be patient. investors need to be patient. Things don’t always work out like magic. Compounding is another thing that people don’t get because your money makes more money and the returns add up, which is a constant positive cycle that shouldn’t be disrupted. People rarely understand how important it is to not break this cycle.
