Mutual Fund Mastery interview preparation

Indian AMCs, distributors, registrars and the global fund houses that hire for the same skills — covering the trust structure, NAV and cut-off rules, SEBI scheme categorisation, debt risk and the Potential Risk Class matrix, passives, costs, taxation and distribution. Every question is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it; we do not invent attributions.

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100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Questions: 100
Traced to a firm: 32
Firms: 19
Updated: September 2026

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086How is the asset management industry changing?Markets and industryHardsuperdayNeuberger BermanAsset Management · London · 2022
Say this
Four things at once: money is moving from active to passive, fees are falling every year, the industry is barbelling into cheap beta and expensive private assets, and distribution is consolidating onto platforms. In India there is a fifth — the market is still growing fast enough that everyone can gain assets while the average fee falls.
Then walk it
1. Active to passive is the dominant trend. Globally passive now holds roughly half of US equity fund assets. In India passive assets have crossed 10 lakh crore, led by institutional money and index funds rather than ETFs, and the 2018 total return benchmark rule accelerated it by making active underperformance visible.
2. Fee compression follows mechanically, and it happens through mix shift as much as through price cuts. SEBI's TER slabs push the cap down as a fund grows, so success itself lowers the fee.
3. The barbell: assets are flowing to the cheapest beta at one end and to private credit, infrastructure and alternatives at the other. The squeezed middle is the mid-priced active equity fund, which is most of the traditional industry.
4. Distribution is consolidating. In India that is direct-plan platforms, digital onboarding and the rise of execution-only apps, which changes who owns the client relationship. Whoever owns distribution captures more of the economics than the manager does.
5. India-specific tailwinds worth naming: SIP flows of well over 25,000 crore a month, penetration of only about 5.5 crore unique investors, and new regulatory categories — specialised investment funds between mutual funds and PMS, and a lighter framework for passive-only fund houses.
6. Then the judgement call, which is what the question is really for: scale and cost win in beta, genuine differentiation wins at the expensive end, and mid-sized traditional managers have to pick one. I would rather join a firm that knows which of the two it is.
Where candidates lose it
Saying 'passive is growing and fees are falling' and stopping. Everyone says that. The differentiators are the barbell shape, the distribution power shift, and — for an Indian role — knowing the actual penetration and flow numbers. And have a view on what it means for the firm you are sitting in.
Expect next
- Where does that leave a mid-sized active manager?
- Is India following the same path as the US?
- Which part of the business would you want to be in?
Reported by candidates at Neuberger Berman (Asset Management, London, 2022). Source: Wall Street Oasis.

Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.

100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Say this

Then walk it

Where candidates lose it

Expect next