Efama

European bond funds experienced a fifth straight month of net outflows in May as inflation continued to rise and markets anticipated tightening of monetary policy in Europe and the United States, according to data on 29 countries posted by the European Fund and Asset Management Association, Efama. 

Europe’s asset management industry on Wednesday called on governments across Europe to take additional actions such as introducing new tax incentives to protect retail investors and savers against inflation. 

Net assets of worldwide investment funds decreased by 2.5 percent in the first quarter as the decline in the United States and Europe was only partly offset by net inflows in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the latest International Statistical Release published by the European Fund and Asset Management Association, known as Efama. Bond and money market saw strong net outflows during the first three months, although China bucked the with rising inflows for money market funds.

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.