For years, European investors have paid higher fees and have found it more difficult to access low-cost, passively managed products than US investors. Traditional sales and distribution channels are partly responsible for the huge disparity in retail take-up between Europe and the US, where half of the ETF market is retail, compared to only 10% in Europe. BETTER FINANCE points to France, where most retail investors target high-cost unit-linked insurance savings products, as an example of how traditional distribution methods can work against investors.
A recent article by BETTER FINANCE’s Managing Director, Guillaume Prache, found that, even though insurance products were the most used retail savings product in France, they had, “on average, resulted in real [after inflation and fees] losses for savers over the last 20 years”.