India's mutual fund story has so far been written by a fairly narrow cast: salaried professionals in big cities, comfortable with English, apps and equity risk. The industry knows its next chapter cannot be. Growth now has to come from first-time investors, smaller towns and smaller tickets, and the regulator has been nudging fund houses in the same direction, from expanding beyond the top thirty cities to encouraging SIPs small enough for a daily-wage budget.

The awkward truth is that this new investor is harder to win than the last one. First-time money is nervous money. It arrives with no experience of a market cycle, quits at the first fall, and often belongs to someone for whom a few thousand rupees is not a rounding error but a month's discipline. Getting it in is a technology problem. Keeping it in is not.