UTI Mutual Fund has touched the one crore mark in terms of the number of live investor accounts, underlining its position as India's largest retail mutual fund company.
Mutual fund investors are used to asset management companies emphasising their size primarily in terms of the size of the assets they are managing. However, with asset bases being determined largely by short-term cash parking by banks and corporates, it's a poor measure of AMC's retail reach and of the number of customers it is serving.
While the size of the investor base is not announced frequently by AMCs, here are some interesting numbers. UTI has 1 crore investor accounts, HDFC 33 lakh, Franklin Templeton about 25 lakh and ICICI Prudential 21 lakh.
As one would expect from its pedigree, UTI is the largest by a wide margin. However, it must be kept in mind that while these numbers are likely to be proportional to all these AMCs' actual customer base, they are not the same as the number of customers. Many investors have more than one investor account with an AMC and the actual number of investors that the fund industry serves is rather hard to figure out.
