Expense Account, Mint There is a hilarious mail exchange a friend forwarded me between him and his portfolio management scheme (PMS) “relationship manager”. Friend invests money five years ago and forgets about it. 2011 tax time approaches and he pulls out the PMS to see how it did. Where did my Rs 8 lakh reach...
Expense Account, Mint Though I knew the extent of angst against banks as serial mis-sellers of financial products, I was a little surprised at the huge reach-out from readers after the column last week where I wrote about systematic cheating by banks (http://bit.ly/iffYbq) to collect fees and commissions on retail financial products. Apart from sharing...
Expense Account, Mint I wonder why the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has got its head buried in sand over the extent of lies that bankers tell their customers in their attempt to hit them with inappropriate financial products to earn their bonuses and meet their targets. And I wonder how banks can calmly tell...
Expense Account, Mint The murmurs heard are now backed by data. Banks and large corporate distributors are churning mutual fund investors. Mintmutual fund editor Kayezad E. Adajania’s story “Banks nudge investors out of MFs; smart HNIs stay for bull run” (http://bit.ly/aTPn2A) has data to show that banks and large corporate distributors have churned their mutual fund...
Expense Account, Mint This is a story that has been waiting to build scale, to add the four zeros it takes to gather the critical mass to declare something a scam, a bubble, trouble or just messy management. On Tuesday,Mint broke the story about the notional Rs 14,000 crore valuation deficit in three plans run by...
Expense Account, Mint India is not alone in blindly staggering around for a solution to the problem of getting the last mile correct in retail financial products. I’m back after a week in Seoul (pronounced to rhyme with Yowl), South Korea, as a spousal add-on to a global financial planning congress. Spouses, luckily, were invited...
Expense Account, Mint Armed with basic knowledge of an Excel sheet and some dribbles of wisdom after a basic capital markets course, when I opened a unit-linked insurance plan (Ulip) brochure five years ago and tried to do the math, I fell off my chair. The sheet showed me a product that was so inherently...
Expense Account, Mint While we were used to the mutual fund industry complaining about its regulator, soft voices against the regulator are surfacing in the life insurance industry as well—and they sound very surprised. The funds were used to a tough regulator, but the insurance industry is a bit open-mouthed by the sudden turnaround in...
Expense Account, Mint I cannot forget the conversation with the chief of a newly born asset management company. The year was 2008. The world as the West knew it was collapsing. And this CEO’s US-based parent company, bang in the middle of imploding all across the world, was on life support paid for by the...
Expense Account, Mint Calvin and Hobbes play this wonderful game called Calvinball. The key feature of the game is that it operates under rules, but these are “subject to be changed, amended, or deleted by any player(s) involved. These rules are not required, nor necessary to play Calvinball”. This game looks suspiciously like the Indian...