BSL Nipun

Every distributor - big or small - should utilize this initiative

K S Rao, Head - Investor Education & Distributor Development, Birla Sun Life AMC

13th October 2016

In a nutshell

K S Rao - the ever energetic and enthusiastic education missionary of our industry - completes 3 years in his role spearheading investor education and distributor development at Birla Sun Life MF. Rao takes us through the significant milestones that his team has achieved in these 3 years and also provides a curtain raiser on new education initiatives that his team has rolled out. In particular, one investor education initiative is something Rao urges every distributor - big or small - to leverage. Its called Nivesh Pathshala - read on to understand more about it and bring your clients and prospects to this Pathshala, at your own city or town.

Friends,

In September 2016, we completed 3 years of our journey in empowering and enabling investors and distributors through our investor education and distributor development initiatives. I would like to share some important milestones we have crossed in this journey and also share with my distributor friends some more new initiatives that we have lined up for them.

CFGP: When we initiated our flagship distributor empowerment program - Chartered Financial Goal Planner 15 months ago, we took on a mission to create 5000 CFGPs among the MF distribution fraternity. I am very happy to share with you that we have crossed this milestone in just 15 months. We have now embarked on a new goal of training and certifying 10,000 MFDs as CFGPs.

In the proposed RIA guidelines, the Chartered Wealth Manager program is likely to become one of the programs that enables exemption from the IA-1 and IA-2 certification exams. We see CFGP as a foundation to the CWM program and are already actively involved in rolling out CWM certification training as a part of the BSL Nipun initiatives.

I will urge every MFD who has not yet acquired the CFGP certification to approach our team and participate in this training program. This will be your first step towards becoming RIA ready over the next 3 years.

All our 5000+ CFGPs can now avail our continuous learning facilities, our goal planning tools and calculators. Our FinGo app which is meant for distributors, is being enabled with several learning modules too, apart from the goal planning tools.

BSL Nipun initiatives: CFGP is one part of the umbrella of distributor training and development initiatives that we offer within BSL Nipun. I am very happy to share with you that in these last 3 years, we have completed over 1000 distributor training programs across 140 locations in all parts of the country. We are especially proud of the fact that by covering 140 locations, we have made BSL Nipun truly inclusive. Total number of MFDs who have been trained in our various programs exceeds 30,000 - but some MFDs have availed more than 1 training program. In terms of unique MFDs who have participated in BSL Nipun training initiatives, the number is now over 16,000 - thus making BSL Nipun Learning Academy one of the largest distributor development initiatives in the industry.

In the last 6 months alone, we have conducted 203 programs covering over 10.500 MFDs. Training modules cover a wide range - from product training to business development and also towards becoming digitally ready.

It is our constant endeavour to come up with new programs based on distributor needs. There are three new programs being launched in the current quarter in addition to our most popular modules like "Demystifying Debt", "IFA for IFA", Journey to 2020 etc.

1. Mindshare to Market share: This program covers behavioural finance concepts and aims to help MFDs understand investors better and engage with them better using this understanding. Business growth can be accelerated through deeper engagement, which this program will help enable. It is about understanding customers as much as about product offerings.

2. 10 X by 10 Y: This is a productivity enhancement program that will discuss ways in which MFDs can grow their business 10 times (10 X) over the next 10 years (10 Y).

3. Financial planning simplified: This is an extension of our CFGP program and will focus on practice management inputs to offer simplified financial planning services.

Investor education: In these 3 years, we have completed over 2500 investor education programs. I have spoken about some of our flagship programs earlier on Saturday School including My First Pay Cheque, Pehla Kadam, Nivesh Mahakumbh and Samruddhi (Click here to know more). There is one new program which every MFD can participate in with us, which is called Nivesh Pathshala.

Nivesh Pathshala is a 30 minute interactive multilingual (11 languages) audio visual presentation which helps investors understand how to accomplish their financial goals. Nivesh Pathshala sessions are held at all our branches across the country. Every MFD can utilise this opportunity to educate his clients and prospects on a goal based approach to realising their financial dreams through this very engaging yet short session. Please speak to our branch managers and schedule your investors participation in our Nivesh Pathshalas.

There are three more exciting initiatives that we are working on, which will further expand our investor education and distributor development reach and scope. Watch this space for updates on our new initiatives. And in the meanwhile, please feel free to leverage the BSL Nipun training programs that are scheduled for this quarter.

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