Expense Account, Mint
The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) long overdue guidelines on wealth management and distribution of financial products such as insurance policies and mutual funds by banks were uploaded on its website on 28 June. The guidelines can be accessed here:http://bit.ly/11xD6DZ and comments sent to the RBI till the end of July. The final guidelines will be released thereafter. Although RBI already has rules in place to regulate the sale of third-party products and wealth management services, these are more than 20 years old and out of sync with ground realities of how banks actually advise clients, refer and sell financial products. The new guidelines seem to be triggered by the large-scale violation of know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) regulations by banks as exposed by Cobrapost.com in a nationwide sting (http://bit.ly/1aULAIv) that covered more than 20 banks. RBI’s internal audit showed that such violations were rampant as was mis-selling of financial products.