Consumer Interest

Can Banks Recover Credit Card Dues from Your Fixed Deposit Even if It Is ‘Time-barred’?

Recently, Thane additional district consumer disputes redressal commission held that banks can recover the dues from a credit card customer from the...

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Fixed Income

REITs: How They Work, How They Are Valued and Are They Worth Investing in?

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are a new asset class in the Indian financial market that offers exposure to income-generating commercial real...

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Mutual Funds

Can Diversification Achieve Higher Returns than Concentrated Portfolios?

Diversification is a term bandied about in the investing realm, but people cannot really figure out how to do it correctly

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Mediclaim

Are Fixed-benefit Critical Illness Plans Better than Indemnity-based Plans?

Critical illness policies are designed to be useful when a person is struck with a life-threatening illness.

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Mediclaim

Is Arogya Sanjeevani Health Policy Made for You?

Health insurance is a policy which pays for medical treatments and hospitalisation.

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Financial Planning

Things to Do After the Death of a Parent

My father expired on 28 November 2016. He was a government servant and retired as a Joint Commissioner, Income Tax.

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Loans

Why SBI's new Home Loan Scheme is highly risky for you

SBI has introduced a Home Loan scheme 'SBI FlexiPay Home Loan', where the borrower has the option to pay the interest component in the first few years

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Life Insurance

HDFC Life To Refund Premium after 96% Loss

The case highlights that the ‘generic benefit illustration’ which insurers gave in the past was a perfect mis-selling tool

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Consumer Interest

7 Steps to Buy A Better Car Insurance

Buying a car insurance? It’s a bit different from buying life or health insurance.

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Financial Planning

Best-kept Secret to Fund Your Child’s education

You need just a few products to save for your child’s education

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Changes in Our Business Model
 
 
25th Sept 2020
 
Greetings from Moneylife Advisory Services
 
Between financial years 2019-21, SEBI has come up with extensive changes to investor advisor regulations. On Sep 23, 2020, SEBI had issued new additional guidelines. This comes just two months after extensive changes announced in July 2020. Earlier, in December 2019 there was an ad hoc circular
 
As a result of these changes, IAs, cannot accept fees through credit cards, will have to sign a 26-clause investor agreement, have to maintain physical record written & signed by client, telephone recording, emails, SMS messages and any other legally verifiable record for five years. IAs were already asked to record the suitability and rationale for every piece of advice given, sign them and store them for five years.
 
While these extensive and frequent changes, designed to strengthen the conduct of IAs are well-meaning, these have sharply increased compliance efforts and cost. We, being online advisors, find many of changes harder to implement, compared to advisors working in the physical space. We will have to have an army of advisors, administrative and tech staff to be compliant. If we do this, we will have to divert money to these areas and the cost of our service will double. We want to remain the least-cost service in the market to benefit more and more people. In the circumstances, we are forced to change our business model from “advisory” to “research”. This will mean the following:
 
What remains the same:
  • Recommendations on insurance, investment and Lion stocks, will continue as a part of the MAS premium subscription. Our strength has always been research and this will remain available to you through our recommendations.
  • The magazine and all textual content will remain as part of the service
  • We will have to suspend the restructuring tool.
 
What changes:
  • The interactions in Ask / Handholding will offer investment advice but not specific to your situation. It will offer information on investment products and also clarify your doubts about various financial products. It will be a forum for information, not for advice. This will be implemented with immediate effect and our guidelines in Ask, reflect this now.
 
Over the next few weeks our site and our communication to you will reflect these and other additional changes.
 
We feel this will not affect you much in terms of what really matters in investing: knowing what to buy and when to buy. This is our edge and it will still be available to you.
 
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Debashis Basu
Founder