EUROPE: EFAMA publishes annual report

Monday June 16 2008

The European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) has published its Annual report for the 2007-2008 period.

The annual report includes a special chapter devoted entirely to the impact of the liquidity and credit market turmoil on the European asset management industry in 2007.

The report features a separate statistical section highlighting developments in the European investment fund industry in 2007, highlights include:

* European investment fund assets grew by 4.8% in 2007 to reach € 7,924 at the end of the year-As a result, total net assets under management increased by € 360bn in 2007. Total assets in the UCITS market reached € 6,201bn at end 2007, reflecting a 4.2% increase when compared with end 2006.

* In the non-UCITS industry, total assets increased by 6.8%, reaching € 1,723bn at end 2007. Special funds collected € 76bn in new money, compared to € 68bn in 2006. Inflows were the largest in Luxembourg (€ 38bn), followed by Germany (€ 27bn), Denmark (€ 6bn), and the United Kingdom (€ 4bn).

* Among the fund industry’s leading countries, Luxembourg and Ireland recorded the highest asset growth in the European investment fund market in 2007 (11.6% and 10.6% respectively).

The United Kingdom and Germany followed in this ranking, with an asset growth of 5.9% and 2.3% respectively .

Hedge Funds

EFAMA has made comment on the fact that to date there is no common position regarding a possible regulation of hedge funds among EFAMA members. Besides lobbying for a pan-european hedge fund regime, a 2005 joint study on hedge funds carried out by EFAMA together with its Italian member association, Assogestioni, suggests at least two options to address this problem:

* to create a specific European hedge fund (beside the others), for example through amendments to the existing UCITS Directive;

* to focus on the type of investor to whom such a fund is offered, for example by harmonising private placement rules for funds.

UCITS Review

Following the recent speculations of having the entire UCITS IV project to create a genuine pan-European single market for investment funds, scrapped, EFAMA expressed concerns in this regard, maintaining that it was in the industry’s best interest to avoid a complete failure of the UCITS IV project given the emphasis that has already been behind it.

Fund Processing

EFAMA has been working with other organisations to ensure that the Fund Processing Passport (FPP) becomes the industry standard for the communication of all the key ‘’operational’’ information that fund that fund promoters should provide about their funds in order to facilitate their trading.

In order to meet the requirements of multi-domicile fund managers and fund managers that are active in countries that that would not offer a local database, EFAMA has started to explore the possibility of creating a European database that would be complementary to the local databases to produce and publish FPPs taking into account the possibilities of co-operation between the local databases, in particular in the area of distributions of FPPs.

To download the report click on the above link .

Funds-Axis Limited has developed a unique Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) tool that, along with other functionalities, automatically captures controls and distributes all fund information and fully supports the EFAMA’s Fund Processing Passport (FPP).

For further information on Funds-Axis GRC Solution contact info@funds-axis.com