At the EuroFinUse General Assembly, on 25 March 2013, Jean Berthon was elected as President to head the one and only organization dedicated to defend the rights of financial users. On January 1st 2013, Euroshareholders and EuroFinUse – the two European organizations representing individual shareholders, investors, savers and other financial services users – merged to
The EFAMA conference was a good opportunity for Steven Maijoor, Chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority, to recall the ongoing research into the practice of closet indexing by European fund managers and to reiterate assurances that the financial industry’s regulator will continue to take a look at this harmful activity for both the
On Tuesday, June 28th, the President of the PanSlovenian Investors’ & Shareholders’ Association, Kristjan Verbič, spoke at a rally to support workers and minority shareholders in their protest of the Slovenian Sovereign Holdings (SSH), a majority shareholder of the Port of Koper (Luka Koper), changing the company’s supervisory board. The Port of Koper, is one
“It is time for regulators to investigate sales practices at banks”, says Madison Marriage, Journalist for the FT. According to Cerulli, a research company, 90 per cent of the money that entered Europe’s fund industry between 2009 and 2013 went to independent asset managers. This figure raises the disconcerting question of whether the “open architecture”
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
In article published this morning, the Wall Street Journal covered BETTER FINANCE’s concerns on the performance of pension savings’ returns in the EU. The 2015 edition of our research report “Pension Savings: The Real Return”, which now covers 15 EU countries and represents 85% of the EU population, shows that “savers in [most] European countries are getting a raw
"It is mis-selling if a manager is perfectly conscious of replicating the index and then selling it to an investor as an active fund". This was how Juan Manuel Viver, Policy Officer at BETTER FINANCE, described "index huggers". Across Europe, investment funds are now being investigated for charging a higher fee for taking a more active role in
Algarvedailynews.com echoes the conclusions drawn in BETTER FINANCE’s "Pension Savings: The Real Return" in which British pensions are shown among the worst in all of the European Union countries. The article stressed that high charges and inflation are to blame for the poor performance. The result: pensions in Britain have not grown as fast as the cost of living.
Guillaume Prache, Managing Director at BETTER FINANCE, was quoted in the Financial Times following his contribution to EFAMA’s report “Building Blocks for Industry Driven Investor Education Initiatives”. Presenting the investors’ perspective on "The fall of financial literacy", Prache suggested that plans to improve financial literacy should include resinstating basic financial mathematics in European curriculums, as
Today’s Financial Times story is based on the recent EuroFinUse’s Response to the Public Consultation on the review of the European System of Financial Supervision from the European Commission. The FT echoes EuroFinUse’s views on the need for a more balanced representation of retail users in the European consultative “Stakeholder Groups”, and the need for