Efama

Firms selling Ucits and alternative investment funds are experiencing a downturn linked to the dire international economic situation, the war in Ukraine and the lockdown in China. Investor demand for these types of funds has dropped sharply, according to the European Fund and Asset Management Association (Efama), who released figures showing that net assets of Ucits and AIFs have declined by 4.5% this past quarter.

Europe’s asset management industry on Wednesday threw its backing behind a legislative proposal to give asset managers a bigger say in the application of liquidity management tools, or LMTs, at times of market stress. The managers, not the supervisors, should be responsible for deciding on the use of such tools,  the proposal says.

Led by a steep drop in bond investments, European Ucits investment funds saw net outflows rise more than five-fold in February when compared to a month earlier due to worries over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and over rising inflation, according to the European Fund and Asset Management Association, Efama.

Funds defined as Undertakings for the Collective Investment in Transferable Securities, or Ucits, recorded net outflows of 43 billion euro in February, compared to net outflows of EUR 8 billion in January 2022. 

A comprehensive review by the European Commission has the potential to put the European long-term investment funds (Eltif) regime back on track and set it up for the kind of success Ucits funds have experienced. Eltifs can become competitive with AIFs by removing many factors that made Eltif take-up much lower than had initially been hoped. The investment community has been broadly supportive of the reset.

Queen Máxima of the Netherlands has called on European financial supervisors to review financial services for their health impact and urged the banking, payments and investment industries to do more to make sure that their clients make well-informed decisions.

Net sales of investment funds in Europe were at their lowest in November - apart from bonds - as investors worried about the new Covid-19 Omicron variant while awaiting reactions by the world’s central banks to rising inflation, the European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) said on Monday.

Rather than having to file the same publicly available financial and non-financial information multiple times with national and European regulators, why not have a single, centralised repository for this data? That’s the idea behind the European Single Access Point (ESAP) which has just been given the go-ahead. ESMA is now working on the devilish detail, with a view to launch at the start of 2025.

The European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) has today published its latest monthly Investment Fund Industry Fact Sheet, providing data on net sales of UCITS and AIFs sold in June 2021, at a European level and by fund domicile.

Equity, bond, and mixed collective investment schemes (UCITS) have achieved annual net returns of 7.6%, 2.3%, and 3%, respectively, over the period 2010- 2019. These positive returns contrast with the 1% loss on bank deposits.

Despite the huge cost in terms of human lives and economic damage of the corona crisis, European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) summarises the performance of the European fund industry as ‘resilient’. 

This was reflected in the Brussels-based organisation’s 2021 Factbook, published this month. It outlines the most important European trends currently affecting the fund industry.