On the 29th of April, the Financial Times published an article on the varying quality of advice for European investors, found by the EC`s "Study on the distribution systems of retail investment products". Commenting on the grim picture painted by the study, BETTER FINANCE Managing Director Guillaume Prache stated that: "It is difficult for individual
Valdis Dombrovskis, vice president of the European Commission, is to launch an official investigation of long-term retail investment and pension products. In a speech marking a year since the publication of the Capital Markets Union action plan, Dombrovskis said creating a competitive single market for European consumer finance services remained a priority. As a result,
Guillaume Prache’s key focus as Managing Director of BETTER FINANCE has been to campaign against fund managers charging fees in line with active management, while, in reality, mimicking low-cost passive strategies, often called closet indexing. Prache said that “in today’s low-return environment, the high fees of falsely active funds show up more vividly. Since the
Following Monday’s vote by the parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON), PensionsEurope praised MEPs in pushing for a “practicable, proportionate and less prescriptive proposal” compared with that tabled by the Commission in 2014. PensionsEurope welcomed a “simplification” of the universal Pension Benefit Statement (PBS), which consumer group BETTER FINANCE had previously warned against. Indeed
Juan Manuel Viver, Policy Officer at BETTER FINANCE, was quoted in Ignites Europe – the Financial Times’ supplement covering the funds industry – on the call for a cap on the number of fund board directorships held by some Irish industry professionals. The call by a senior EU financial consumer advocate comes following a study carried out by the Irish fund industry regulator which showed that 13 individuals held
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