It's raining complaints from mutual fund investors. Ever since market
regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), had asked all
the fund houses in May this year to disclose investor grievances on
Amfi website, over 3.94 lakh complaints were found to have been received
by the MF industry in 2009-10 alone. This essentially means that one
out of every eight MF investors in the country had some complaints or
the other during the period. While the most common grouse is on
non-receipt of dividends and redemption proceeds, failure of fund houses
to update personal details has also annoyed investors.
Fund houses like UTI MF, Birla Sun Life MF, ICICI
Pru MF, Canara Robeco and Franklin Templeton received the largest
number of complaints. Of course, if one were to look at complaint
received per investor, Birla Sun life and Canara Robeco top the chart.
However,
to the relief of investors, Association of Mutual funds in India (Amfi)
data shows that despite such high number of investor grievances, fund
houses managed to resolve the problems within the 30 days of receipt of
the complaint.
In total, the 39 fund houses received over 3.94
lakh complaints in 2009-10, of which approximately 3.79 lakh crore (96%)
were resolved by them within 30 days of receiving the complaint, as per
Amfi data.
UTI MF received highest number of complaints at
99,300 for the year followed by Birla Sun Life MF and ICICI Pru MF who
received 95,400 and 57,600 complaints, respectively. Among large-sized
fund houses, DSP Black Rock (731), HDFC MF (7,673), SBI (8,174) and Reliance MF (10,234) received relatively lesser complaints
compared to their assets under management. Sanjay Sinha, CEO of
L&T Mutual Fund, says, "There has been quite a few complaints
received on non-receipt of statement of account. However we feel that,
as a percentage of total number of applications received the number will
be a fraction of a percentage." L&T MF received 377 complaints
for the year.