Can Online Investing be the Key to Access For Small City Investors?

Despite all the advertisements for financial products that we get to see in large cities access to modern financial products is quite limited for a person staying in smaller towns or even villages. The largest players in insurance and mutual funds don't still have the kind of reach that will allow people to easily buy an investment product. Also, at a time when there has been a regulatory squeeze on costs be it insurance or mutual funds and the markets have been less-than-friendly leading to tepid growth and in many cases de-growth, one can't exactly expect financial service providers to go around opening branches and adding advisors and agents. Selling financial products through banks would have been a potent tool but then there are restrictions on the number of tie--ups in case of insurance. Also, with banks getting into such relationships just for fee income, the whole thing becomes purely transactional in nature. In a country where you have low financial awareness credible and quality fiancial advice needs to be bundled with the sales of the financial product. That really can't happen if a banker is just pushing financial products. Given this state of affairs, the glimmer of hope comes from the results of recent surveys that seem to be indicate that a lot of e-commerce transactions are happening in the smaller towns including a recent one from Boston Consulting Group (BCG). This should be great news for online broking firms that seem to be providing a whole range of services and products to people along with material on their sites that inform the readers about various products and services. Thisshould work for selling plain vanilla products such as term insurance plans, travel insurance plans and index mutual funds. How about more complicated investment products especially unit linked insurance plans (Ulip)?  I suspect that would need some form of one-to-one guidance though there are online versions of products like Ulips. The more complicated products need to be evaluated for their fit to individual situations. As Internet penetration increases in our country, we can also expect this medium to be a catalyst in enhancing access to financial products. That's a very desirable outcome in a country where reasonably high savngs that are not optimally deployed.