'Fund managers have greater accountability': Mr A. K. Sridhar, Chief Investment Officer, UTI Mutual Fund.

(From Business Line)

A spanking new office at the Bandra-Kurla complex and a new public face are just the visible facets of the transformation that UTI Mutual Fund has silently wrought over the past year. The fund has brought about significant changes in areas such as fund management and investment-monitoring systems. Mr A. K. Sridhar, Chief Investment Officer at UTI Mutual Fund, speaks to Business Line on the changes ushered in at UTI Mutual Fund. The focus is on a tighter rein on costs, performance-based pay and an elaborate state-of-the-art system of checks and balances to ensure adherence to prudential investment norms.

Excerpts from the interview

What has changed about fund management at UTI?

Earlier, decision-making for fund management was centralised and power concentrated in a few hands. Starting from September 2001, we have decentralised the decision-making, bringing in specific fund managers for each fund. Each manager focusses on two-three schemes and decision-making ends with him. We have 10 fund managers now - four handling pure equity funds, four handling debt and balanced funds and two handling the offshore funds. The fund managers get inputs from the advisory team and they execute their decisions through the dealing room. We have consciously adopted a five-layer structure.

These are: Advisory, fund management, dealing, back-office and compliance/audit. Each has complete independence and will report directly to the CEO. This is a structure that you will probably not find at any of the funds in India, mainly …