This week we brought a news story that recognise the importance of remembering the end customer, the retail investor in their quest to save their cash. European fund trade association, EFAMA, writes that persistent barriers—such as limited financial literacy, information overload, and complex onboarding procedures—continue to prevent EU citizens from moving their savings out of low-yielding bank deposits into long-term investment solutions.
The association urges policymakers to deliver a more intuitive, engaging, and accessible client experience, particularly for first-time investors, and to that end recommends extending the suitability-light regime to both commission- and fee-based advice, particularly for retail-ready products like UCITS and retail AIFs.
No such issue seems to loom so large in the US, where fast growing asset management firm Dimensional Fund Advisors goes from strength to strength and product to product as it builds up its armoury of investment weapons. In our interview with Joel Schneider, deputy head of Portfolio Management and one of a team of three that oversees all the vehicle types in equities for the firm in the US, he says: Schneider says launching ETFs has allowed Dimensional to give lots of different clients, with preferences for different vehicles, access to the same investment strategy.
“The benefit is that we have different clients across different channels. It’s good for us and good for them. Clients didn’t love needing to make a trade-off between getting the investment strategy they wanted and the wrapper they wanted. This is a cool thing for the industry, flipping the paradigm from vehicle-first decisions to strategy-first decisions.”
Today is the last day of voting in our inaugural Japanese ETF awards. Please add your votes now for your favourite ETF issuers and service providers on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The link is here.
The winners will be celebrated at the ETF Express Japanese ETF Awards event to be held at the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 4th September, this year.
Beverly Chandler, Managing Editor
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