People sometimes ask why I became an AMFI-registered distributor after years of just giving advice informally. Here’s the honest answer.
For most of my career, the conversations happened the same way. Someone would find me in the mess room, or send a message during a stretch of good signal mid-contract, and ask some version of the same question: “What do you actually do with your money between contracts?”
I’d been sailing for over 20 years by the time I really noticed the pattern. It wasn’t one or two people asking — it was a recurring thing, contract after contract, across different ships and different crews. Mariners talking to mariners, because we understood each other’s situation in a way that felt hard to explain to anyone shore-based. Nobody else seemed to quite get why a “monthly SIP” was a strange concept when your income didn’t arrive monthly. It’s the same pattern we’ve since written about from the other side — how informal advice, however well-meant, isn’t the same as a proper conversation.
Advice given, but not really owned
I gave what advice I could, honestly and as well as I understood it at the time. But looking back, it was advice given without real structure behind it — no formal risk assessment, no accountability beyond a good intention, no actual mechanism to help someone act on it properly. It came from a good place, but “good place” isn’t the same as “properly equipped.”
What changed: becoming an AMFI-registered distributor
COVID changed a lot of things for a lot of people, and for me, one of them was how seriously I thought about all of this. Watching how differently people’s financial situations held up during that period — some with a real cushion, some without one, almost entirely down to whether they’d built something deliberate beforehand — made the gap between informal advice and real structure obvious in a way it hadn’t been before.
So in 2021, I became an AMFI-registered Mutual Fund Distributor. ARN 185676, if you want to look it up. It sounds like a small bureaucratic detail, but it changed what I could actually offer. Instead of a casual opinion over chai, I could properly assess someone’s risk profile, understand their actual goals, and help them choose mutual fund schemes that fit — with real accountability attached to the process, not just my own judgment.
The same discipline, a different subject
I’ve spent two decades in an industry where “it’s probably fine” is never an acceptable answer during a safety audit. You check the system. You question the assumption. You don’t sign off on something because it looks right on paper — you sign off because you’ve actually verified it. That standard doesn’t feel optional to me, in any part of my work.
Money deserves the same treatment. Not blind confidence, not a tip passed along in the mess room, but an actual process — understanding someone’s real situation, being honest about what fits and what doesn’t, and staying involved as their situation changes contract after contract, promotion after promotion.
Why ChartMyFunds exists
ChartMyFunds is what came out of formalising all of this properly. It’s still built on the same thing that started it — mariners asking mariners for help — just with real structure behind it now: proper registration, a genuine risk-profiling process, and access to the kind of research and fund analytics that a casual conversation could never offer. Becoming an AMFI-registered distributor didn’t change why people came to me. It changed what I could actually do once they did.
If you’ve been getting your money guidance the way I used to give it — informally, from someone who understands your life but isn’t really equipped to properly guide you — I’d genuinely like to talk. That’s exactly the gap this was built to close.
As an AMFI-registered Mutual Fund Distributor (ARN 185676), recommendations are made only within mutual fund schemes and only after understanding your risk profile. Get in touch to start a conversation, or read more on our About page.
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