The mutual fund industry added more than 81 lakh investor accounts in 2020-21, taking the total tally to 9.78 crore, and experts hope that the healthy growth in folios would continue in the ongoing fiscal also.
The industry had added 72.89 lakh investor accounts in 2019-20, according to data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India.
Investors are increasingly acknowledging the importance of making investments in mutual funds for meeting financial goals both long term and short term, Kaustubh Belapurkar, Director Manager Research, Morningstar India said.
“The awareness about investing in mutual funds has been on the rise over the last many years with the investor awareness programmes, ground work done by mutual funds, financial advisors and distributors in educating and shepherding investors through their investing journey,” he added.
Folios are numbers designated to individual investor accounts. An investor can have multiple folios.
According to the data, the number of folios with 43 fund houses rose to 9,78,65,529 at the end of March 2021 from 8,97,46,051 in March 2020, registering a gain of 81.19 lakh folios.
The mutual fund space saw an addition of 1.13 crore investors account in 2018-19, 1.6 crore accounts in 2017-18, over 67 lakh folios in 2016-17 and 59 lakh in 2015-16.
Prateek Mehta, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Scripbox, said there are a number of reason owing to the folios growth, and some of the significant ones are due to the surge in digitisation driven by proliferation of technology, financialisation of savings and ease of transactions.
