In its spring edition, Global Custodian published an article on how the EU is aiming at shedding a light at the calculation and measurement of investment transaction costs. EU financial regulations such as the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), the regulation on Packaged Retail Insurance-based Investment Products (PRIPs) or the European Shareholder Rights Directive have been introducing increased requirements to disclose a wide range of costs and charges. In addition, various national regulators and industry bodies imposed further disclosure obligations.
However, on the methodology of calculating the investment costs there is still little agreement and cost information is presented in a very inconsistent way to pension fund trustees. In the article, Guillaume Prache, managing director of BETTER FINANCE expressed his opinion on the issue and added that investment industry lacks standardisation.
The text is of the article is available here.