The default ambition in Indian financial services today is to sell everything. Open any finance app and the menu keeps growing: loans, insurance, gold, credit cards, fixed deposits, now even holiday bookings. The industry calls it cross-selling, and it is treated as the obvious path to growth. More products per customer, more revenue per download.
Which is what makes a decision taken in a Delhi office in 2005 worth revisiting. Shashi Kant Bahl had been in retail financial products since 1999, selling the full spread of that era, as most agents did. Then he did the opposite of cross-selling. “We were selling all the different products,” he recalls. “In 2005, we shut everything down and looked only at mutual funds.”
It was not an obvious call. Equity funds still carried the suspicion left by earlier market cycles, and a SIP was something you explained to a household across a desk, one meeting at a time. Narrowing to a single product meant walking away from every other commission a client could generate. The wider industry was moving the other way.
Two decades on, the arithmetic of that subtraction is visible. MutualFundWala, the firm that grew from that decision, reports assets of over Rs 795 crore across more than 8,000 investors, with a monthly SIP book above Rs 7 crore, built almost entirely retail, one household at a time. A SIP book of that size is a useful measure precisely because it renews itself monthly. It exists only as long as thousands of families keep choosing to continue.
Focus also explains how the business absorbed a decade that was supposed to end it. When direct plans arrived in 2013 and zero-commission platforms followed, distributors who sold everything to everyone had little to defend. A practice built on one product had depth instead of breadth: the accumulated judgement of guiding the same investors through crashes, recoveries and the temptation to quit midway. That is not a line on a brochure. It is the part of the trade an app has yet to replicate.
The specialisation has since taken corporate shape. In 2023 the practice became PP Mutual Fund Services Private Limited, the initials carrying the name of the founder’s late father, Prem Prakash Bahl, with a co-director and a team across operations, compliance and technology. Out of it came the MutualFundWala app, now fully operational and listed on ONDC, the government-backed open network for digital commerce. On it, an investor can complete KYC and start a SIP without touching paper, see holdings across fund houses on a single dashboard, and invest against goals rather than tips.
Even inside the app, the one-thing philosophy shows. There are no loans or gold hawked on the side, and a deliberately old-fashioned feature sits at its centre. “Every investor who comes on board gets a relationship manager,” says the founder. “The human touch stays primary.” An app can process a transaction; it takes a person to talk someone out of abandoning a plan in a falling market.
The model has its open questions, and they should stay open. Firms like his earn through commissions embedded in regular plans, and whether advice justifies that cost is something every investor ought to keep asking. Regulation will keep testing the economics, as it has for a decade.
But there is a lesson in the record that has little to do with any one firm. In a market that rewards adding products, one of the more durable retail franchises of the past twenty years was built by removing them. Indian finance spends a great deal of energy on what else it can sell. The rarer discipline, it turns out, is deciding what not to.
PP Mutual Fund Services Private Limited (MutualFundWala) is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor. Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks; read all scheme-related documents carefully.
