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Moneycontrol Mutual Fund Summit to explore ‘How SIPs Are Empowering Bharat’
Mumbai: Moneycontrol, India’s number one business and markets news platform, has announced the 2024 edition of ‘Moneycontrol Mutual Fund Summit’. Scheduled to take place on 21 August 2024 in Mumbai, the summit will convene financial experts, industry leaders, and regulators to discuss the rapid growth of India’s mutual fund sector. This year’s theme, ‘How SIPs Are Empowering Bharat,’ highlights the growing impact of SIPs in driving financial inclusion across the nation. The summit will also host the Mutual Fund Distributor Awards to celebrate the sector’s achievements and encourage financial empowerment and inclusion across India.
Amarjeet Singh, Whole Time Member, SEBI will deliver the keynote address, setting the stage with his perspective on regulatory frameworks and their role in shaping the future of mutual funds in India. Other prominent speakers include Viswanathan Anand, Indian Chess Grandmaster; Radhika Gupta, MD & CEO, Edelweiss Asset Management; Swarup Mohanty, VC& CEO, Mirae Asset Investment Managers, India; Kailash Kulkarni, CEO, HSBC India Asset Management; Nimesh Shah, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, ICICI Prudential Asset Management; Ajit Dayal, Founder and Advisor, Quantum Advisors; Lakshmi Iyer, CEO – Investment & Strategy, Kotak Alternate Asset Managers; Rajeev Thakkar, Chief Investment Officer and Director, PPFAS Mutual Fund; Roshi Jain, Senior Fund Manager, HDFC Asset Management; Dinesh Balachandran, Head of Equity, SBI Mutual Fund, Ashish Gupta, CIO, AXIS Mutual Fund, Suresh Sadagopan, SEBI RIA, MD & Principal Officer, Ladder7 Wealth Planners; Misbah Baxamusa, CEO, NJ Wealth; Sanjay Chawla, CIO – Equity, Baroda BNP Paribas Mutual Fund and Akhil Chaturvedi, Chief Business Officer, Motilal Oswal AMC.
Speakers and panellists will discuss strategies for integrating new and first-time investors into the market, emphasising the importance of educating them about the risks and potential returns. Key topics will include setting realistic return expectations, navigating investors through volatile markets, and strengthening internal mechanisms to prevent fraud and make asset management companies more robust.
Speaking about the upcoming summit, Puneet Singhvi, CEO – Digital and President – Corporate Strategy, Network18 said, “The Indian mutual fund industry is reaching new heights, and with this platform, we aim to both acknowledge and fuel that progress. As India’s leading finance news platform, Moneycontrol is bringing together the country’s top financial experts to explore the influence of SIPs and the opportunities and challenges they present. We believe this gathering of industry giants will be instrumental in shaping the future of the sector.”
Avinash Kaul, CEO – Network18 (Broadcast) & Managing Director A+E Networks I TV18 added, “The growing Indian mutual fund industry holds immense potential, and to fully realise it, we need timely discussions and collaborations. At Network18, we are committed to driving the industry forward through meaningful conversations. The Moneycontrol Mutual Fund Summit is more than just a platform for knowledge sharing; it’s a catalyst for transformative dialogue, bringing together the brightest minds in finance to explore the future of mutual fund investments in India.”
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
