They felt the role of Internet in the industry would gain momentum. The increasing use of technology only serves to increase investor awareness.

"Mutual funds are now required to gear themselves up for better performance in terms of returns and investor service, faster and accurate information dissemination and wider coverage of the market" Templeton Mutual Fund chief executive Rajiv Vij said. He said it is widely understood and accepted that besides fund management capabilities, volume-handling capacity, accuracy, speed and cost-effective operations are necessary for survival and growth of individual entities in the industry and harnessing technology is being recognised as the best solution to meet these challenges.

Today, the mutual fund industry is one of the fastest-growing segments of the financial services sector of the Indian economy. With 35 operating entities, 550 products, investible funds of over Rs 1,00,000 crore and about 50 million unit-holding accounts, the industry has gathered critical mass, necessary to accelerate its growth.

UTI executive director BS Pandit said globally the vehicle of the God of Knowledge (Lord Ganesh) is the mouse. However, among the technologies harnessed by mutual funds, information technologies occupy the centrestage.

and the use of technologies by funds goes much beyond IT.Various technologies being used by mutual funds globally include computer telephony integratoin (CTI), imaging, ATM, bar-coding/MICR, OCR (optical character recognition)/ICR (intelligent character recognition), and sensory techniques. These help in optimum resource utilisation annd are possible technologies for consideration. However, he said, does the intensive use of technology mean dispensing with the `brick and mortar' organisation. Mr Pandit felt that the future will belong to the `click and brick' organisation rather than `click only' organisations, he said. Nevertheless, the real feat will be to leverage technology while preserving the best human aspects of business. Successful funds will find ways to empower their sales people with tools that enable them to use their knowledge, experience and judgment to help investors. Technology has been successfully used for service delivery in most developed markets.

CAMS director V Shanker said mutual funds can use e-commerce for sales, distribution, and customer communication and focus on using the Internet to provide superior customer service, thereby achieving great improvements especially in dealing with clients. The Internet can also be used for informtion dissemination to investors about the various schemes and their details. Apart from it, the website of the funds can also be used to offer the facility to investors to chat with the fund managers and also with the service and sales staff.

E-mail can also be used for investors in order to solve their grievances, Mr Shankar said. In this connection, he cited the automated intelligent e-mail answering system.