ISSA Mutual Funds Working Group

Assets invested in UCITS funds in Europe have doubled over the past five years, and this trend continues. At the same time, the European fund processing infrastructure remains fragmented. Cross-border consolidation and convergence of national market practice is slow. In 2007, this ISSA working group launched an initiative to propose practical ways of gradually achieving more process efficiency and reductions in cost and risk to investors, their custodians, fund distributors and transfer agents. The group's vision was to describe a generic fund order handling process that is

• paperless
• suitable for automation based on ISO standards
• service provider and business model neutral
• identical for domestic and cross-border trades

The group's approach was to identify best practice that already exists locally and recommend elements that could be shared and implemented on a pan-European level. Its findings are now available. The final report contains numerous detailed and often small-step recommendations. From those, ten higher level principles were derived to guide the way forward. An annex document provides various case studies and additional background information.

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> Members of the Working Group

Within the context of the ISSA Fund Working group, ISSA supports the Dematerialised Mutual Fund Sales Agreements initiative driven by Schroders and a number of early contributors, aiming at the dematerialisation of mutual fund sales agreements.