According to Mr Sanjay Sachdev, the managing director and CEO of IDBI-Principal, Future Goals will provide investors with unique life-stage investment solutions - a product that is quite old in Europe but new in India.

The four-month-old IDBI-Principal is currently managing funds worth Rs 700 crore, of which Rs 250 crore has been deployed in debt and the balance in equity. This includes the five funds launched by IDBI earlier.

Apart from floating new schemes, suitable restructuring of the old IDBI funds have been done to provide investors greater value, said Mr Sachdev.

He added that the company's focus will not be on collecting funds. "Rather, our focus is to spot gaps between intrinsic values and asset prices to enhance investors's value as well as to mitigate the risk factor adopting adequate risk management systems," he said.

Analysing the present mutual fund industry, Mr Sachdev lamented that the industry had not done justice to the investors. "Investors here have been taken for a ride, money has been destroyed, market has crashed. On the contrary, we don't want to play with people's money. We want to manage it based on their needs," he said.

According to him, the schemes under "future goals" have been designed to meet the various lifestyle needs of a vast section of investors.

Right from helping investors evaluate their goals at a particular point of time to fund selection and finally rebalancing of the investment portfolios the "future goals" programme is claimed to have the advantage of helping investors maintain an optimum return on their investments thus allowing them to maintain an ideal investment mix at any stage of life.

The Growth Fund is targeted at investors who are willing to accept risks that come with investing in equities. The Balanced Fund targets the investors who are seek long term growth and do not want to invest solely in equities. The Income Fund targets those who want stable returns on their investments with minimum risks and the Cash Management Fund aims at those who want easy liquidity and low principal risk

IDBI has an asset base worth over Rs 72,000 crore, while Principal Financial Group controls assets worth $ 117 billion. According to Mr Sachdev, the joint venture between these two giants is likely to usher in a new era in the country's mutual fund industry.