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So there's been a lot of noise around the tied offers from Oro Wealth and Kuvera where liquid fund investments are solicited with an incentive thrown in to acquire an Amazon Pay Gift Card with a 3% extra value thrown in for free. There's a view circulating that the offer is coming from Amazon and not from the financial intermediary - and therefore it does not amount to the intermediary offering an incentive to solicit MF business. There's also this view that it is a conditional offer - ie, the 3% free value kicks in only if the customer opts for an Amazon Pay Gift Card. When trying to examine whether a line has been crossed or not, it sometimes helps to look at other scenarios which can play out, if this precedent is set. What if a bank were to announce extra reward points on its credit card if an investor purchases MFs through it? What if the bank were to tie up with a large retail chain to offer exclusive reward points that can be redeemed at any of this retail chain's stores, for certain level of MF investments done through the bank? The retail chain may treat this as a novel customer acquisition strategy and may be willing to bear the cost. But will this amount to a cross subsidy by the bank and therefore an incentive given by the bank to solicit MF business? If the answer here is yes, we need to think hard about whether Amazon offering an incentive to popularize its Amazon Pay Cards amounts to an incentive to solicit MF business by the entities that have tied up with Amazon. The Amazon deal is innovative, it does help promote the savings habit as Oro Wealth and Kuvera suggest - but it perhaps may open the doors to many more "innovative" cross-subsidy offers which can defeat the provisions that explicitly ban offering incentives to solicit MF business.