E-Growth Key To Markets Servival
B S Pandit, vice-president of the Unit Trust of India (UTI) said, "This technology that is entering the market will dismantle old barriers and open floodgates of new opportunities in terms of service to customers and better competitive practices for participants as well."
UTI is planning to start marketing its products online. "Within the next two months, it will sell units online along with helping its 45-million unit-account holders to manage their accounts online." This, according to Pandit, is an anticipated extension, considering today nearly all banking, insurance and mutual fund products are sold online.
"If we have to keep up, we have to extend in this direction," he said.
While e-transformation will bring about a radical change in trading, there are some real problems that would perhaps stand in the way. Bandwidth would pose as a big problem and would hamper online trading.
Besides this, there is the Internet accessibility which is not as widespread as the need would be to enable this service to reach its fullest, he said. Pandit said, e-transformation was more an attitudinal change than an actual change in the way of trading.
Anand Rathi, president of the Bombay Stock Exchange, spoke on stock exchange futures scenario. Rathi said that IT and the stock exchange were closely related but didn't see a virtual exchange forming any time soon.
"As a result of the Internet becoming a medium for trading, it did not automatically mean that there are more players in the same sized market and, therefore, existing players get a smaller share of the cake. Just that now the cake itself has become bigger," Rathi said.
As far as banking products are concerned, it has become necessary for all banks to turn themselves into a one-stop-shop in order to retain their customers, according to Inder Bir Singh, treasury head, marketing and sales, Standard Chartered. "As a bank we have to extend our facilities to cater to other financial aspects of our customers, so that they do not move to a place that provides them these services on one platform," he said.