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What is Systematic about Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) and who invented it?
Personally, I think you are approaching this from the wrong angle.  You're somewhat correct in assuming that what you're reading is usually some kind of marketing material.  Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) is not a universal piece of jargon in the financial world.  Dollar cost averaging is a pretty universal piece of jargon in the financial world and is a common topic taught in finance classes in the US. On average, verified by many studies, individuals will generate better investment returns when they proactively avoid timing the market or attempting to pick specific winners.  Say you decide to invest in a mutual fund, dollar cost averaging means you invest the same dollar amount in consistent intervals rather than buying a number of shares or buying sporadically when you feel the market is low. As an example I'll compare investing $50 per week on Wednesdays, versus 1 share per week on Wednesdays, or the full $850 on the first Wednesday.   I'll use the Vanguard Large cap fund as an example (VLCAX).  I realize this is not really an apples to apples comparison as the invested amounts are different, I just wanted to show how your rate of return can change depending on how your money goes in to the market even if the difference is subtle.  By investing a common dollar amount rather than a common share amount you ultimately maintain a lower average share price while the share price climbs.  It also keeps your investment easy to budget. Vanguard published an excellent paper discussing dollar cost averaging versus lump sum investing which concluded that you should invest as soon as you have funds, rather than parsing out a lump sum in to smaller periodic investments, which is illustrated in the third column above; and obviously worked out well as the market has been increasing. Ultimately, all of these companies are vying to customers so they all have marketing teams trying to figure out how to make their services sound interesting and unique.  If they all called dollar cost averaging, "dollar cost averaging" none of them would appear to be unique.  So they devise neat acronyms but it's all pretty much the same idea.  Trickle your money in to your investments as the money becomes available to you.