Vajpeyi in Calcutta on Friday. A Telegraph picture

Calcutta, April 23: DSP Merrill Lynch plans to foray into discretionary portfolio management for corporate houses, high net-worth individuals and financial institutions — both domestic and overseas.

“Assets built through portfolio management will constitute a major chunk of our business in the next three to five years,” said Alok Vajpeyi, president of DSP Merrill Lynch Fund Managers Ltd.

The company is awaiting the approval of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and has already initiated talks with possible clients. Vajpeyi hinted at a possible alliance with an insurance company and is also upbeat on managing pension funds.

DSP Merrill Lynch plans to have a corpus of Rs 10,000 crore by the end of this fiscal (calendar year 2004) by focussing on retail distribution against Rs 5,740 crore as on April 15. The company hopes to achieve this by increasing assets under existing schemes and introducing new products.

The company intends to gradually move away from the institutional bias to a broader retail base. It has managed to reduce the institutional investment percentage from 80-85 per cent to around 60 per cent.

Branch expansion will help increase the retail base. At present, there are 11 branches of DSP Merrill Lynch all over the country which would be raised to 20, with nine new branches slated to be operational by the end of this fiscal. It has also tied up with Bank of India and Corporation Bank to distribute their funds.