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,
Barely a month has passed this year without a high-profile attack on the asset management industry over controversial issues such as high fees, poor investment performance, hidden charges and short-termism. The concern in the asset management industry is that the next attack will come from a source the market cannot afford to ignore: regulators. Indeed
EU regulators must have the power to stop financial firms from selling toxic products that could trigger another crisis, industry watchdogs said this week, stepping up pressure on the European Commission to do more to protect retail investors. “We need legislation that deals with . . . how products are manufactured and intervention powers,” said
Dismally low returns on EU pension fund investments over 15 years? The allegation comes in a study by BETTER FINANCE, the European Federation of Investors & Financial Services Users. The report, Pensions Savings: The Real Return, points to excessive fees, points to other charges, and badly framed taxation rules, as the culprits. “Pension savings did
An article which appeared in the Belgian newspaper L’Echo discusses the reticence of Belgian citizens to take risks with their savings. Guillaume Prache (BETTER FINANCE) and Jacques Berghmans (Treetop Asset Management) discuss why this is the case and what the potential solutions could be. Belgians don’t trust bankers to invest on their behalf. As Mr.
BETTER FINANCE’s concerns on the review of Shareholder Rights Directive were echoed in two recent articles by Daniel Hunter in Freshbusinessthinking.com and in InternationalTrade platform. Speaking at the 15th European Corporate Governance Conference held in Milan, Guillaume Prache, Managing Director at BETTER FINANCE, stressed that many individual shareholders of EU companies will still have to pay high fees to exercise their voting
In an interview with Europolitics, Guillaume Prache urged European politicians and policy makers to act and make the long-term financing of the economy their real priority. BETTER FINANCE’s Managing Director believes the reforms put in place after the financial crisis focused too much on “financial stability” in order to avoid the bankruptcy of major financial institutions and did far too little to protect investors and financial services’ users.
On October 4, Juan Manuel Viver, EuroFinUse’s Policy Officer, was quoted in Ignites Europe , the Financial Times supplement for the funds industry, on the KID Regulation proposal for retail investments pre-contractual disclosures. Mr Viver referred to EuroFinUse’s concerns regarding the detrimental effect that the implementation of the KID could have on UCITS’ KIID, and the
Early this month Better Finance published its response to the European Commission’s Call for Advice regarding the identification and calibration of infrastructure investment risk categories. Together with its members, BETTER FINANCE believes that particular caution is needed if insurers are to participate in infrastructure investments. We fully support EIOPA’s proposals, especially related to the scope and the qualifying
In a book to be published in May “Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal”, Jack Ewing reveals new details of the Diesel Gate conspiracy covering up the fact that its cars were designed to deceive pollution regulators. It all started with the publication of the results of a test realized in 2014 by graduate students