‘Finfluencers should not mislead public’

livemint.com:

Mint’s 9th annual mutual fund conclave on Thursday. Finfluencers are entities that are capable of influencing people financially via various social media platforms.

“We need to let educators do their job and on the other hand ensure quality of education is good," said Narayan, while urging the ₹44-trillion MF industry to explore new types of products to ensure sustained growth in assets under management. “This is an area which is going to require a lot of discussion on how to ensure quality financial education and at the same time ensuring that wrong doers do not spread pervasive incentives and destroy the trust in the system," said Narayan.

This comes at a time when the industry is expecting the market regulator to come out with a consultation paper regarding how the regulator plans to curb mis-selling by so-called finfluencers. To be sure, Sebi chairperson, Madhabi Puri Buch, in a recent board meeting said the markets regulator is currently working on a consultation paper covering this subject.

Narayan also pointed out the need to protect regulated practitioners like distributors, registered investment advisors, registered analysts and segregate them from those that are not registered and at the same ensure that there is no room to manipulate the system. Recently, Sebi came out with an advertisement code that mandates registered investment advisors (RIAs) and registered investment analysts (RAs) to take prior approval from BASL (BSE Administration and Supervision Ltd), and pay up ₹3,000 fee, in case of individual RIAs, and ₹6,000 if it concerns corporates, each time a new advertisement has to be put out.