The European MiFID II regulations came into force on Jan 3rd 2018, aiming, among other things, to increase investor protection, encourage competition and align national regulations within the EU.

One area specifically targeted in the regulations is the requirement for cost disclosure to investors, an area where the transparency towards investors has been found severely lacking. Simply put, investors have generally had a hard time knowing even how much they have been paying for investments, and even less about the exact nature of these costs, making informed decisions on investments, and comparisons between different investment vehicles, difficult.

The regulations aim to correct the situation by requiring the providers of financial services and products to disclose the projected costs before an investment decision is made (“ex ante”), and to report the actual costs incurred to the investor on a regular basis (“ex post”).

WHAT WE DID

AVT resources formed an integral part in the development of a product solution for a leading provider of IT services in the Nordics, from the initial legal analysis, through formulation of requirements, software design and implementation, to test and deployment.

The product assembles, calculates and reports direct and indirect investor cost and charges, both ex ante and ex post, and encompasses real-time integration towards information providers and customer core systems, event-driven calculation and reporting of costs, as well as online services for retrieving estimated costs ex ante and actual costs ex post.

 

RESULTS

The solution has been rolled out at two major Swedish fund distributors, serving upwards of two million investors, and is currently being implemented at a major insurance provider, targeting the Insurance Distribution Directive (“IDD”), allowing them to fulfil their legal obligations.