UTI Mutual Fund plans Post Office-centric schemes

UTI Mutual Fund (UTIMF) is planning a joint venture with the Indian postal department to introduce products meant to be sold through the postal channel.

Confirming the development, senior fund officials said the plan was still in the planning stage and will be taken up only after its distribution tie-up with the postal department shows some degree of success.

The schemes under the joint venture would be largely targeted towards the retired bracket of customers, savings plans for children, retirement plans, schemes targeted at women and so on.

Ashutosh Bishnoi, chief of marketing, UTIMF, said: "We do not mind developing products which are specific to a particular channel of distribution."

The intention, said officials, is to sell products which would appeal to, and be easily understood by the kind of, people who generally frequent post offices. So the stress would be on savings rather than investments.

"Once the reach of the postal products swells to a certain size, we would have no problem in utilising this channel exclusively for any of our other products," Bishnoi said.

Such schemes, in accordance with the industry norms, would not be assuring any returns at all.

UTIMF, in fact, plans to utilise the postal channel in a wider way than it has been doing so far.

According to UTIMF vice-president, and head of marketing Ratin Lahiri, there are plans to set up a postal finance mart. "In other words, designated post offices will be used as specific point of sales for a whole host of financial products to be launched by the UTIMF."

Under the current arrangement with India Posts, UTIMF is selling four schemes through 50 post offices throughout the country.

These schemes are "" UTI Mahila Unit Scheme, Unit Linked Insurance Plan, Children's Career Balanced Plan, and UTI Retirement Benefit Plan.

In order to sell the scheme, each of these post offices would have an account manager while personnel in the post offices are being trained to sell the products and explain the products' attributes to the customers.