In 2014 I was carrying forms. Physical ones, with a cheque stapled to them, driven across Indore to a collection centre before a cut-off. If a signature didn't match the bank record, the whole thing came back and we started again the following week. Last month somebody completed the entire process from their sofa in Dewas while I was on the phone with them.
Twelve years is long enough to see what genuinely changed and what only appeared to. The gap between those two is the interesting part, so this is my honest account of both.
What actually changed
The paperwork collapsed. This is the real transformation and it's easy to undersell if you weren't there for the old version. KYC used to take weeks and a physical visit. Now most people are done in a sitting, and the ones who aren't are usually stuck on something specific like an old mobile number, which our guide on KYC covers.
Small amounts became possible. A monthly instalment that would have been considered not worth the paperwork in 2014 is routine now. That opened this up to people it was effectively closed to, which is the change I'm most glad about.
Information stopped being scarce. Then, getting a scheme's holdings meant asking somebody like me. Now it's on a phone in thirty seconds.
The number of people investing. In a city like Indore this was a fairly narrow group twelve years ago. It isn't now, and in the smaller towns around us the change is even sharper than in the city.
What did not change at all
Here's the part that surprises people, and it's why I don't think of the last twelve years as a story about progress.
People still stop at the bottom. Every single downturn, the calls come at roughly the same point, and the question is always some version of the same one. Nothing about faster onboarding changed this. If anything it's slightly worse, because stopping is now three taps instead of a form and a week's delay to think it over. Our post on what a red number actually means exists because I've had that conversation so many times.
People still ask which fund is best. Twelve years of freely available information and the first question hasn't moved. The information changed. What people want from it didn't.
The buffer still isn't there. I'd say it's still the most common gap I find, in households with good incomes, in 2026 just as in 2014.
Families still don't know what they hold. I've sat with more than one family after a death, trying to reconstruct what existed from bank statements. Digital records didn't fix this. Somebody still has to tell the others.
The thing I got wrong
I'll admit this one because it took me years to notice.
Early on I thought most problems were information problems. Explain it well enough, and people would do the sensible thing. I put real effort into explaining.
It doesn't work like that. The people who do well aren't the ones who understood the most. They're the ones who set something up they could sustain and then didn't interfere with it. I've had clients who couldn't explain what a debt scheme is and who've done perfectly well, because they kept going through two bad stretches without calling me in a panic.
Understanding helps. It's just not the thing that decides it. That took me an embarrassingly long time to accept, given I still spend most of my week explaining things.
What the smaller towns did
The change I didn't predict is where the growth came from.
In 2014 this work was concentrated in the bigger cities and I assumed that's where it would stay. It didn't. Some of the steadiest investors I deal with are in places like Ratlam, Khandwa and Satna, and a fair number of them started because a son or daughter working elsewhere set it up for them.
What's different about those households isn't the amount. It's that they tend to leave things alone. A household in a smaller town that starts an instalment of a modest size and keeps it running for eight years has done better than a lot of people I know in the city who kept adjusting.
I don't have a tidy explanation for that. My guess is it's distance from the noise, and the noise is doing more damage than anyone admits.
What got worse
Not everything improved, and it'd be dishonest to write this as a story of steady progress.
The volume of confident advice. Twelve years ago bad tips came from a relative. Now they come at scale, from people with an audience and often without any registration behind them. That's a genuine deterioration, and our guide on checking whether somebody is registered is there because of it.
Speed cutting both ways. The same three taps that make starting easy make stopping easy. A week's friction used to save people from decisions made at nine at night after reading something alarming.
The scoreboard effect. When you can check a value every day, you do, and daily checking of a fifteen-year holding produces anxiety and no information. Nobody checked daily in 2014 because nobody could.
The conversation I have more often now
One category of call has genuinely grown, and it's not the one I expected.
It's the person who already invested, on their own, through an app, two or three years ago. They've got six or seven schemes, no clear reason for most of them, and no idea whether the whole thing adds up to anything. Usually they picked each one at a different moment for a different reason that made sense at the time.
That call barely existed in 2014, because starting was hard enough that nobody accumulated holdings by accident. Now it's routine, and honestly it's a reasonable problem to have. They started, which is the hard part.
What it needs is somebody to lay the whole thing out on one page and ask what each holding is for. Half the time the answer is that three of them are doing the same job, which our post on how many funds you should own goes into.
What I'd tell somebody starting now
Four things, and none of them are about scheme selection.
Get the buffer done first. Twelve years of watching households confirms this more than anything else on the list.
Start smaller than you think you should. An instalment you keep for ten years beats a larger one you abandon in month seven, and I've seen both often enough to be confident about it.
Decide now what you'll do when it falls. Not if. It will, more than once. Deciding in advance is the only defence, because deciding during is not really deciding.
Tell somebody in your family what exists. Not the amounts if you'd rather not. Just where.
Why I still do the same thing
People occasionally ask whether an app has made this work redundant, which is a fair question and deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one.
For the transaction, largely yes. Anybody can do that themselves now and some should, which is why we've written about direct versus regular plans rather than avoiding the subject.
What hasn't been automated is the part that turned out to matter. Somebody picking up the phone in a bad month. Somebody who knows a household's actual situation and can say the honest thing when the honest thing is inconvenient. Somebody the family can call afterwards.
None of that is technically difficult. It just requires a person who's been around long enough to be worth calling, and that part can't be built quickly.
Twelve years in, that's the whole job as far as I can tell. Myfolios is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-145870), working from Indore since 2014, and we're still doing the same unglamorous thing.
