Birla Sun Life MF has taken its engagement with IFAs to a whole new level by constituting a 12 member IFA Advisory Council, which meets regularly in a Board Meeting format and advises on business development aspects. This initiative, run by Sidharth Damani, Deepak Gupta and Bhavdeep Bhatt, does not just take inputs from the Council, but is held responsible for implementation and status updates to Council members - which makes the effort productive and participative for all concerned. Bala takes us through the thinking behind this initiative and how it actually helps forge closer links, deepen engagement with the IFA fraternity and drive business initiatives with critical ground level inputs. As part two of this coverage, we will feature in a forthcoming article, the thoughts of one of these IFA Advisory Council members, who takes us through how he sees this initiative.

WF: You are perhaps the first fund house to have set up an IFA Advisory Council. What was the thinking behind this move and what is the role of this Council?

Bala: The idea of an advisory council came up when we introduced our Privilege Club for IFAs. We created 4 levels - Titanium, Platinum, Gold and Silver category members, with different levels of benefits. We provide various plans that basically help the IFAs look at their long term benefits, including the Golden Age plan, similar to a pension plan. This has been a success since it includes additional benefits in the form of medical insurance cover and scholarship for their kids. We also make them a part of our knowledge series and give them special attention.

As part of the initiatives we realised the need to have some of those members advising us on our business plans as well as help the IFA community in building their business strategy that will in turn help both the industry and AMC to grow. The advice and suggestions will actually benefit both - us as well as the IFA community, as we both ultimately work together to get investors to invest in mutual funds and give them a good experience.

In this journey, every time we get a different experience. This experience is largely a mix of positives and negatives, but ultimately we have to keep finding solutions for changing that perception and go to the next level of growth. We can do so provided we know actually how we are connected to ground realities. Keeping this in mind we created the IFA Advisory Council nearly 8 months ago. This initiative is carried through by Sidharth Damani and Deepak Gupta, both Co-Head Sales at Birla Sun Life AMC and Bhavdeep Bhatt, Head - Product and Business Development. These three gentlemen drive the larger agenda explained above and focus on effective and timely implementation of such suggestions to ensure execution excellence.

We have tried to ensure good representation across regions. The IFA Advisory Council today has got 12 members. It has a good mix of T15 and B15 IFAs and actually has more representation from B15. They comprise both individuals as well as firms that have been in the business for more than 10 years. There are some very young members in the council as well.

Following the formation of the IFA Advisory Council we have had two rounds of meets in the last 6 months. We meet every two-three months, at our office, in a Board Meeting style. We have an agenda which gets circulated before the meeting and we focus only on that agenda. Typically 3 main issues are flagged for discussion in each meeting. Members come fully prepared in terms of what inputs they need to provide.

We also give them a status report after the meeting, on whatever had been discussed in the last meet, and how these have been implemented with respect to the action plan. Reasons and constraints are also explained in cases of non execution of discussed actions, at the same time all ideas regarding solution to those problems are given serious thought.

What this does is to have a more participative approach in our business model, with inputs coming directly from ground level - from experienced advisors who are dealing with investors. The fact that we take the effort to complete the loop with our status reports on suggestions given, is well appreciated by our IFA Advisory Council members. I would like to make a special mention here for the members of the IFA Advisory Council - for their level of involvement and passion to support and build the Mutual Fund industry.

WF: The topics that are discussed, are they typically more operations or business development oriented ?

Bala: It's a mix of both. However, we try to take the help of the Advisory Council most on business development. Today, the need of the hour is not so much operations, but expansion. For example, for the purpose of expanding the market, we ran an advertisement in Maharashtra inviting new people to associate themselves with mutual fund products and mutual fund as a business model. We got nearly 650 responses. Of these, 350 were warm responses and there were hot leads coming from Pune (30), Nasik (30), Aurangabad (30), South Mumbai (30) and even such a small location like Kolhapur (30). When the IFA Advisory Council was asked if anyone would like to be an unpaid, honorary mentor to this group, all members volunteered and said they felt happy to associate themselves with these kinds of activities that were mainly related to business development.

WF: What were some of the best ideas that came through from the advisory council during the last two meetings? Which one in your view is the best idea that has been implemented?

Bala: Among the IFA Advisory Council suggestions at the very first meeting was supporting B15 locations with knowledge initiatives. Taking this into note, the Team mobilized efforts in these markets, conducting 100 Workshops in 100 days across such locations. The effort that took off then still goes strong as is evident from the Training Calendar for Q1FY2014-15 below. We hope that more and more IFA members can make the best of these knowledge opportunities.

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