ET Money’s acquisition by 360 ONE - Should you be worried or excited?

livemint.com:

₹249 every month. The rest of the platform remains free for transactions. In 2023, Sebi introduced a circular asking RIA platforms with transaction-only clients to move to so-called execution-only platform (EOP) status.

This was to ensure that the spirit of the RIA licence was adhered to, which is giving advice and not transaction processing. Thus, ET Money took a category EOP 1 licence for its non-Genius customers, a userbase of around 900,000. Also, as India’s youth have pivoted to YouTube and Instagram for investment advice, ET Money built its own content, with great success.

ET Money’s YouTube channel has 440,000 followers and frequently gets hundreds of thousands of views for its videos. “We fully committed ourselves to organic growth via differentiated content across platforms (X, Youtube, Instagram). Our views-to-followers ratios are possibly the best in the industry, resulting in millions of views of our content," said Navlani.

“Today, we are able to attribute two in three new investor acquisitions to organic channels, with roughly equal contribution from content and referrals resulting from word-of-mouth." Some teething troubles have emerged, however. Mutual funds are reluctant to onboard EOPs because EOP charges have to paid by them and not the end-customer. These charges have to paid from an asset management company’s profits, and not from the scheme account—the investor’s pocket, in other words.

Quant Mutual Fund, one of India’s largest mutual funds, resisted the onboarding, and ET Money stopped accepting fresh inflows into Quant Mutual Fund. The Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) has capped transaction costs for EOPs at ₹2 per transaction. But some AMCs saw even this amount as too much.