COMMUNICATE 98 FEATURES
11 YEARS. 2800 CLIENTS. 450 CRORES.
GAJENDRA KOTHARI | MD & CEO, ETICA WEALTH MANAGEMENT
Gajendra Kothari wanted to make it big on his own. He could have led an easy and comfortable life by entering his family business or continuing with his job. However, he had something else on his mind. While working with UTI Mutual Fund, he saw a lack of proper communication between financial institutions and investors. To bridge this gap and to help people reach their financial goals, he took the plunge and became an independent financial advisor. He has established an advisory firm, Etica Wealth, where he and his 25member team manage assets worth Rs.450 crore from over 2800 clients. He also appears in various mutual fund shows and answers mutual fund queries on many national dailies. What inspired you to take financial advisory as a profession? I ventured into this profession by chance. I did my MBA from Delhi’s International Management Institute. After that, I started working with UTI Mutual Fund and went ahead to head UTI’s business development in the UK and European markets for three years. I worked at UTI Mutual Fund for a total of seven years, but I always had the itch to become an entrepreneur. During my tenure at UTI MF, I came face to face with disgruntled investors. There were a lot of gaps in communication. When I interacted with these investors, I was able to change their mood. I would come up with
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talking points that could hold their attention. After the interaction, they would heed to my investment suggestions. I realised that I fit in the business-toconsumer space better than the business-to-business segment where I was. The number of educated and employed people are going up. At the same time, the level of financial awareness is not growing at the same pace. Where are we going wrong? While all other subjects are taught in schools and colleges, financial education has not found its place in our present educational setup. Even MBA students are not aware of the basics of personal finance. As youngsters are not aware of investment avenues, they go to their parents, who in turn put the money in Fixed Deposits and other traditional forms of savings. Therefore, we need to educate the parents as well as the youngsters. Every organisation can have a financial planning section as a part of their induction program so that they start investing from the first month onward. We need to have investor awareness programs for youngsters and make them realise that investing is necessary and easy as well. How do you make investing easy to understand for a person with no background in finance, especially while conducting investor awareness programs? We make sure that our conversations do not have any financial jargon. We have seen that people understand investing and take an interest in it if we include real