BSL Jaanoge Tabhi Toh Maanoge 20th April 2015
A great B-15 education initiative that you can leverage
K S Rao, Head of Investor Education and Distribution Development, Birla Sun Life MF.
 

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Last fortnight, K S Rao took us through BSL's extensive worksite education initiatives and how IFAs can partner with his team in this exercise (Click here to read the article). Taking this further, Rao shares with us a project close to his heart - the extensive education initiatives that his team has undertaken in partnership with regional media - an initiative that goes deep into small towns and rural markets. After the huge success of this initiative in Andhra Pradesh, he has now drawn up plans to replicate the model in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, UP and Punjab. Read on to understand more about this innovative education initiative and how you can join Rao and his team in this fantastic effort.

WF: We spoke the last time about your various worksite education initiatives and how IFAs can leverage your vast resources for common good. Beyond worksite initiatives, you also have a very interesting partnership model involving regional media. How does this work?

K S Rao: This is an initiative that is really very close to my heart, especially since this is the program that has enabled us to penetrate deep into rural markets with our investor education initiatives. We started this journey 2 years back, with a tie up with Andhra Pradesh's leading regional media player, Eenadu. We have so far reached out to over 28,000 people in 46 locations across the state. This is 28,000 people we have interacted with face to face in our programs, apart from the 2 lakh people we were able to reach out to through their newspapers.

Regional media has tremendous reach especially in B-15 towns and they are quite actively involved with communities in smaller towns. The language is vernacular - which appeals to most of the smaller town people. What we found is that working with strong regional media partners tackles the first challenge - getting people to engage with for our investor education programs. Once the media partner successfully draws in people, it is really up to us to engage them meaningfully. Regional media partners typically run a 5 day campaign in the town where we are planning a meeting. This 5 day campaign raises awareness of the event and draws in the people.

We have a 3 hour program, entirely conducted in the local language. Usually, we land up spending at least another hour after that, taking their queries and addressing their concerns. We also have KYC desks set up there to facilitate the process and get them "investment ready". Our experience is that conversions from these initiatives has now gone up to 20%.

We are now replicating this model in other states - in Tamil Nadu with Ananda Vikatan, in Gujarat with Chitralekha, in UP with Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran and in Punjab with Tribune. We did close to 1000 programs so far in conjunction with regional media - for FY15-16, we want to scale this up to 3000.

WF: How do your distribution partners collaborate with you in these events?

K S Rao: All our IFA partners in these towns are invited for the events and we make it a point to showcase them and their value to the assembled audience. In Pondicherry for example, we had an event with 300 people, and 18 of our IFA partners were present too. We highlighted our 18 partners there, and told the audience that these were the people who could serve them and help them invest judiciously. We thus created a catchment for our IFA partners to take forward.

In fact, in all these presentations, we have a portion which talks about the importance of financial advice and the role that a financial advisor plays in helping investors navigate the journey of investments successfully.

We recently published an education guide on the ABC of mutual funds. In this, there is a chapter dedicated to the need for independent financial advice. Our belief is that an advisor plays a vital role in educating and serving retail investors. We are very happy for all our IFA partners to participate in all these education programs that we conduct with regional media partners and will be very happy to showcase them and provide them a catchment area of prospects to take discussions forward, after the event.

WF: What's been the coverage of Nipun - your distributor training initiative?

K S Rao: In FY 14-15, NIPUN completed over 250 programs across 108 locations in the country, covering 14,800 distributors - predominantly IFAs. There are several programs that we run. Some of the more recent ones include "15 ideas for B-15 markets" and "Equity Voyage". We are now running behavioural finance workshops.

We will soon be coming up with a certification program that enables distributors to practice goal based selling. We intend to reach out to 10,000 IFAs in FY 15-16 with this initiative and help them get firmly onto the path of goal based selling.

Nipun for us has three dimensions:

  1. Empower active distributors to take their practice to the next level

  2. Activate dormant distributors with inputs that boosts their productivity

  3. Bring in new distributors to expand the market

In the 10 districts we have adopted, we have already brought in over 500 new IFAs into the industry.

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