This article is the latest part of the FT’s Financial Literacy & Inclusion Campaign.
In April, just over two years after India’s markets regulator banned an influencer self-styled Baap of Chart, or “father of charts”, from sharing financial education videos, he was back on social media asking his millions of followers for ideas on how to “grow together”.
The brazen reappearance of the influencer, whose real name is Mohammad Nasiruddin Ansari and whose YouTube channel had a peak of nearly 4.4mn subscribers, underscores the whack-a-mole nature of India’s effort to rein in unlicensed “finfluencers”.
As the number of individual Indian investors grows — more than trebling since 2019 to 146mn, alongside a 50 per cent rise in the Nifty 50 index — regulators are cracking down on fraudsters who give stock tips under the guise of general financial knowledge. India’s capital markets watchdog has said in written orders that some content creators “indulged in fraudulent activity”.
“We have finfluencers who have, I think, post-Covid, had quite a field day,” Tuhin Kanta Pandey, chair of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, said in an interview with the FT.
