Mahindra Manulife’s equity suite posted a strong year of performance in CY23. Getting key thematic and sector calls right, being nimble and humble, and above all, the grace of God and good luck – all played a part in this, says Anthony. His team’s aim is to maintain 50th percentile every quarter consistently, which will most likely result in top quartile performance over2-3 year timeframes.
Anthony would like to see more flows into their debt funds, which he says are performing just as well as their equity suite, but don’t get quite the attention.
Having doubled its AuM from 9,000cr to 19,000cr in the last year, Anthony aims to take it up to 30,000cr this year, with a healthy mix of equity and debt assets.
Tech adoption has proven to be a good scale enabler for MFDs– particularly in the transaction execution side. Anthony believes – given the rapid scale at which the industry is growing and adding new investors – the next big scale enabler for MFDs is to drive simplicity across investor portfolios. Simple portfolios are easier to assemble, track and monitor. Complex portfolios with many funds and multiple themes will take huge amounts of time to manage and monitor, which becomes a major scale inhibitor.
One thing he believes MFDs must imbibe from fintechs and wealthtechs is the way they tightly integrate backend processes across products/regulatory environments/registrars, which enables them to respond to frequent information update mandates that keep coming in. MFDs spend huge amounts of time on each of these mandates, taking away precious client facing time. The MF industry he feels ought to create tech enabled solutions for MFDs to streamline these processes the way fintechs have done.