JP Morgan to tie-up with IIMs, ISB

JP Morgan Asset Management India is in the process of tying up with the top B-schools for setting up training programmes for its distributors and sub-brokers.

Krishnamurthy Vijayan, whole-time director and chief executive officer of JP Morgan, told Business Standard, "We are in the process of tying-up with B-schools for training programmes for our distributors and sub-brokers."

He further said, "We are looking at tie ups with at least 3-4 IIMs, Indian School of Business and small-sized specialised institutions".

Presently, the company's HR department is in talks with top B-schools. While discussions with the IIMs are in their preliminary stages. Vijayan said, "We will declare the tie-up arrangement with B-schools by June this year."

The company has finalised the structure of the programme that will cover broad spectrum of financial area.

The training programmes will be financed by the company and experts from JP Morgan too will work as visiting faculty at these programmes.

However, he clarified that it would be a pure training programme and the company doesn't intend to go in for venue branding.

Looking at the competitive market and the need for providing better service to its clients, JP Morgan felt the need to provide training to its distributors.

"Distributors need to be more sophisticated in today's market, thereby providing excellent services compared to others," adds Vijayan.

With the training programmes, the company aims to meet two targets "" to increase the ability of its distributors and to be a responsible corporate citizen.

On the company's business, Vijayan said that his company manages $6 billion of assets (till December 2006) in India. The company had invested in 54 Indian stocks.

He further informed that the firm was overweight on infrastructure (36 per cent), telecom (above 10 per cent), consumer industry (13 per cent), financial sector (16.5 per cent) and IT sector (15 per cent). While the company's investment is underweight on real estate and downstream oil companies.

Giving the reason for the underweight investment in both these sectors, Vijayan said that the real estate sector is not transparent on its business model and so his company in not comfortable in the present scenario to invest in real estate.

However, he further mentioned, "If the regulators are allowed a free hand it will bring in transparency in the real estate companies and in that case JP Morgan may consider investments in real estate scrips."

The company is also keeping a distance from downstream oil companies as the government plays a major role in deciding the retail price of petroleum products.

The company might invest in the future if the policies regarding the oil companies changes and become favourable to the investors.

The company also plans to increase its number of branches from 7 to 21 by 2009. It will further increase the number of its branches to 40 by the year 2011.