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Trust fund rally as mutual industry eyes Rs 100 lakh crore with caution
MUMBAI:If India’s mutual fund industry were a blockbuster, it would now be at its intermission Rs 100 lakh crore down, and another Rs 100 lakh crore to go. That was the spirit animating the fourth edition of the Moneycontrol Mutual Fund Summit in Mumbai, where the country’s top fund managers, regulators, and market veterans converged to chart a responsible roadmap to the next trillion-dollar milestone.
The big number Rs 100 lakh crore in AUM (Assets Under Management) is no longer a pipe dream. But as SEBI Whole-Time Member Amarjeet Singh warned in his keynote, with great inflows come great responsibilities. “People are trusting mutual funds with their money, and that trust should not be disturbed,” he said. “Growing the right and responsible way becomes very important.”
That note of caution echoed across the summit, where talk veered from geopolitics to granularity, inflation to inclusion. HDFC AMC MD & CEO Navneet Munot offered a moral compass: “Truth is the foundation, transparency is the path, and True North can be like our compass.” He praised SEBI’s “co-creative” approach to regulation, one that encourages dialogue, not duels.
Liquidity, not just logic, remains the dominant force in markets, observed Axis AMC CIO Ashish Gupta. “No market is insulated from global risk trade or geopolitics. But liquidity continues to be the biggest driver of asset prices.”
With fund launches, especially thematic ones, flooding the market, the panel agreed that innovation must be balanced with investor education. “We’ve created many pieces like Lego. What’s missing is education,” said Edelweiss AMC MD & CEO Radhika Gupta. “We need to tell people kaunsa mutual fund sahi hai which one fits their goals.”
Gupta also hailed SEBI’s nod to Social Impact Funds as “forward-looking”, opening the doors for ethical investing in India’s evolving MF landscape.
Meanwhile SBI Mutual Fund deputy MD & joint CEO D P Singh reminded the audience that education is also about action. “We’re powering platforms like mutualfundskyusahihai.com to take investor awareness to the next level.”
One number got heads nodding: Kotak AMC’s Nilesh Shah pointed out that India has nearly 30 crore vehicle owners but just 5.5 crore mutual fund investors. “The next leg of growth is clearly in Bharat,” he said, emphasising the need to tap into smaller towns and first-time investors.
The summit closed with a call for balance. More innovation, but with integrity. More investors, but through inclusion. And more funds, but built on fundamentals. With Rs 100 lakh crore already clocked, the mutual fund industry isn’t just managing wealth anymore, it’s managing trust.
And in this next chapter of financial deepening, India’s mutual fund fraternity knows the best returns will come not just from markets, but from meaning.
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NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
