This Saturday I was given the tedious task of tracking down the family investment portfolio. Like everything else in my life, our investment pattern has a life of its own and we find ourselves investing in fits and starts. Like most investors we get inspired by those whose millions have become trillions and exit the moment we find someone’s wealth vanishing with the declining NIFTY. Granted, this loss of wealth is often notional, it is enough to send us into panic mode. Anyway, this post is not about investing but about tracking down investments.

Tracking down investments


The first and simplest step is to contact the broker who gets you involved with investing. Naturally even the broker needs 2-3 days to respond and after you get his statement, you reconcile it with your own by crosschecking with the different Fund houses. Now this is the tedious part.

All Fund houses make it sound easier than making apple pie. All you have to do is contact them

• by email
• by phone which is a toll free number
• by yourself – tracking your investments online

Now I prefer the second option since I find that emails very often get rejected by the Fund House server or land up in their Spam folders. The third option is the most frustrating because the Website designers design a web page that is simply impossible to navigate : and for some strange reason no contact number ever works and if it does, you get hooked on to another answering machine.

The priceless experience of the toll free number

All Fund houses make it seem so easy to dial the toll free number. If you are dialing from a land line, it is well nigh impossible and if you are dialing from a handheld mobile – your hand eye coordination needs to be defter than that of a neurosurgeon.

1. Welcome to XYZ Fund house intones a deep sexy female voice
For information in English press 1
For information in Hindi press 2
For information in Marathi press 3……. you get the drift. The menu options allow you to speak to a customer service agent in EVERY Indian language.

2. If you are an existing customer press 1 else press 2
3. Please enter your folio number followed by #* or any other key the machine deems fit.
4. If you want to know the NAV press 1
5. If you want to know the latest value press 2……. and the options go on
6. Else if you want to speak to a customer service agent press 9

By the time you respond to these instructions your operation has either timed out or not registered since you are on a crappy phone line.

Then if you do happen to press option 6 you wait for a bit till the voice intones : Sorry all our customer service agents are currently busy. Your call is important to us, please hold the line or call back shortly…….and you foolishly wait for a few minutes till the line automatically gets cut off.

But if it is your lucky day and you do get a human voice to attend to you, brace yourself for another harrowing experience of talking to the person on the other end. With all the static and poor connectivity of cell phones, you land up screaming your PAN Number, your date of birth, your address and even identifying yourself ( i.e. spouse, significant other, parent, sibling, joint holder) till it is no longer a secret to all those who can hear your call.

And the worst is of course when you are told that the client details do not exist in their system and you see your real money just vanish in the virtual world!

Help


Dear Fund House


Please note that I am not a distributor but a plain and simple investor, the key work being SIMPLE.
Please make investing more customer friendly the way customers think it should be.


Desperately yours