This investigation follows probes launched by Denmark and Sweden over the past six months. The Dutch investment market is bigger than the Danish and Swedish combined, with investment assets of €469 billion and about 200 asset management companies. If any substantial wrong-doing is detected, the Netherlands Authority for Financial Markets has the power to ban
"Pension Savings: The Real Return" 2014 Edition was mentioned in "Buttonwood’s notebook" column of The Economist. The articles echoes that savers across from Europe have often received negative real returns this century, with the estimate for Britain at -0.7%. Please find the article here and our press release "Beware! Saving for your pensions may be losing you money." here.
On October 27, Guillaume Prache, EuroFinUse’s Managing Director, was quoted in the Financial Times on the European Parliament’s vote on the KID Regulation proposal last week. The Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee approved the KID rules by a large majority but the negotiations with EU member states will not open immediately since the new rules
On the 26th of April, Funds Europe published an article on the challenges faced by consumers investing in financial products, tackling the issue in light of the upcoming public hearing -set for the 29th of June- and the EC`s "Study on the distribution systems of retail investment products". Called upon to comment, BETTER FINANCE highlighted the
Financial Times: Value of saving via pension funds questioned Consumers who save via a pension fund are financially worse off than if they had invested the money themselves, according to new research. High fees, opaque commissions and taxes have been criticised for putting the retirement incomes of millions of European savers at risk. Read more
The debt discharge law is the right path to be followed to help as many borrowers in financial difficulty as possible, given that so far in Romania there is no other law to support them, and banks have been reluctant to come up with concrete solutions to their problems. This was mentioned in a letter
Three Spanish newspapers (Invertia, Expansion and El Pais) report that BETTER FINANCE and the German investor association DSW, one of our member organisations are looking into some possibilities to take legal proceedings at the European level against VW the German manufacturer. Read the full articles here. (in Spanish) – Invertia – Expansion – El pais
Sergio Ermotti, the chairman of UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, has made a bold statement. “It is ok to take risks and make mistakes as long as they are honest ones”, he said. According to the Financial Times, Ermotti pointed out that the key lies in the difference between breaking the rules and making honest mistakes while
The Swedish government is to become the first in Europe to formally investigate closet-tracking funds that charge high fees for active management but do little more than mimic an index. No other national authority has formally investigated the issue. It has received more attention in Sweden after the Swedish Shareholders Association (Aktiespararna, member organisation of
Financial Times has published an article on customer fees associated with pension funds. The text is based on BETTER FINANCE’s report "Pension Savings: The Real Returns" and critically summarizes the situation across the countries covered in the paper. "It is no wonder, finds the report, that pensions and investments are ranked the worst consumer markets