Investor complaints against Mutual funds drop by 30% in FY15

NEW DELHI: Mutual fund houses received about 21,000 complaints from investors in 2014-15, a drop of 30 per cent from the preceding fiscal year on account of efficient grievance redressal mechanism.

These complaints pertain to data corrections in investor details and non-updation of changes about address, PAN (Permanent Account Number), details and nomination among others.

According to industry experts, the complaint redressal mechanism has become efficient at most asset management firms with the grievances getting resolved within the prescribed turnaround time.

As per data on the Association of Mutual Funds of India (AMFI) website, the top 10 mutual fund houses received 20,963 investor grievances in past financial year compared with 30,065 complaints in 2013-14.

The folio base or investor accounts grew to 3.69 crore from 3.43 crore during the same period.

Folios are numbers designated to individual investor accounts, though one investor can have multiple folios.

Among the top 10 fund houses, DSP BlackRock saw the biggest drop in investor grievances, with complaints plunging by 86 per cent to 105 in the past year.

It was followed by Birla Sunlife MF, which which saw complaints tumbling to 1,117, a decrease of 82 per cent during the same period.

IDFC MF saw the number of complaints declining by 58 per cent to 295, while the same for Kotak MF fell by 38 per cent to 253.

Sebi first took note of rising investor complaints in mutual funds in 2011 and hauled up fund houses for not taking serious note of these grievances.

In absolute terms, the highest number of investor complaints were recorded against HDFC MF (6,144) in 2014-15 followed by UTI MF (3,791), ICICI Prudential MF (3,251), Reliance MF (2,299) and Birla Sunlife MF (1,117).

Industry experts believe that large number of complaints are received due to the illegible data provided by investors as well as errors made by investors while filling up application forms.