UPDATE Jun 18
The initial euphoria has now died down about existence of such a service. The shortcomings are out in the open:
One of the lousiest portals. Choosing your existing fund is very strenuous to the eyes as you must scroll through a sub frame, no search, no page down etc.
The UI has become too complicated under so called innovative features for scheduling future orders. The screens are intimidatingly large when all you need to enter is Fund, amount and date.
Feedback on these items has been given but has gone nowhere.
While certain people at the top are good and receptive to customers, customer service and operations head are totally non responsive. They don’t even know good mannerism to talk with customers.
Small matters like adding or deleting bank account require a huge follow up. Unless you relentlessly follow up for months nothing would happen.
I am looking to switch to even paid options.
INITIAL REVIEW
Unfortunately the mutual fund industry in our country is fragmented. Despite the procedures being quite streamlined, every fund house implements them in their own way.
Till now an investor had only two options:
Invest via an intermediary who gives you a uniform interface to all mutual fund houses. This is a costly option as one has to invest in "Regular" funds that pay commission to the intermediaries. If one goes to the fund house directly one can expect to save anything between .5 to 1.5% on the returns as the "Direct" funds save on the commissions. Some intermediaries even charge an up front fee(in addition the commission they earn) while some charge annual fees.
So, if one wants to go directly to the fund house, one has to be good at choosing funds wisely, be prepared to spend time on it, track the investments etc. Independent fund rating sites like value research online can be immensely useful in this. Having prepared oneself to invest directly to save on intermediary expenses next hurdle used to be to register with different MF sites directly which typically involved a lot of repeated paper work. While the business processes of MFs are regulated by SEBI and are similar in principle across fund companies, things like filling the forms etc are totally different across funds and each such form is typically very pesky to fill.
Not anymore. MF Utilities has made it all easy and with no cost whatsoever to the investor.
From 01 Jan 2016, they have also enabled investments in direct funds completely online.
I find their portal to be extremely simple, uncluttered, fast while the back end processes extremely streamlined.
Would definitely recommend MF investors to give it a try.