A number of clients of on-line brokerage platform Groww received a impolite shock, discovering their investments in liquid schemes redeemed with out their authorisation and re-invested in a New Fund Provide.

Kanika Gupta, one such affected investor, mentioned that her whole funding in ICICI Prudential Mutual Extremely Brief Debt Fund Direct was switched to a brand new ICICI Flexi Cap fund with out her data on July 12. By the way, the NFO of ICICI Flexi Cap closed the identical day.

‘No proof from MF’

“They (ICICI MF) are consistently blaming my dealer app Groww, saying they obtained the order by means of them, however until date they haven’t supplied me any proof to verify their declare,” she mentioned.

“Although ICICI MF has assured that they’ll swap again the funding to my unique fund with none loss or exit load, there was no entry in Groww account to authenticate the switch,” Gupta mentioned in a social media put up.

One other investor Ritik Singh, too, confronted an identical problem on July 12. When contacted, Groww instructed BusinessLine, “Greater than 12,000 Groww traders had invested in an NFO. Out of this, round 100 clients had been switched to this NFO from debt funds as a consequence of a combo function launched for this NFO by the AMC. An identical state of affairs was confronted by clients on different platforms as properly. No buyer was impacted due to this. All these instances had been reversed the second Groww and the AMC received to learn about this problem.”

In an announcement, ICICI Prudential mentioned: “Foundation directions obtained from a couple of Registered Funding Advisors and transactions for a couple of clients had been processed within the regular course of enterprise. Upon info gathered a couple of possible operational problem on the platform utilized by the choose RIAs, we instantly reversed these transactions.. with none loss to the purchasers.”

No function: BSE

The BSE mentioned the mutual fund involved has reversed the transactions after discussions with the distributor. “Trade offers a mechanism to transmit orders and has no different function in such transactions,” mentioned BSE STAR MF. Sources at SEBI mentioned the market regulator is already inspecting a number of complaints towards on-line low cost brokers. “However on this newest incident, it’s not clear if the affected traders have filed a criticism with SEBI. If this individual has filed a criticism, SEBI will look into it,” the supply mentioned.

This growth comes whilst many retail traders have been reserving revenue on their direct investments in fairness markets and transferring the funds to mutual funds, significantly with NFOs flooding the market. Certainly, ICICI Flexi Cap made a report assortment of ₹10,000 crore due to traders dashing in to benefit from the bull run in fairness markets. On-line platforms akin to Groww have helped widen the attain of mutual funds with zero brokerage plans. Fund homes have mopped up ₹7,540 crore by means of the launch of 25 NFOs within the June quarter alone towards simply ₹429 crore by way of 9 NFOs in the identical interval final yr.

‘Thorough probe wanted’

“Although it might be one of many points, such occasions ought to be probed totally and ensured that they didn’t occur deliberately. In any other case, traders confidence will probably be shaken, significantly when small traders are being roped into mutual fund with systematic funding plans of low as ₹500 a month,” mentioned Ramesh Pawar, an impartial mutual fund distributor.