Automate and effectively manage your mutual fund distribution and revenue collection
The SalesVision Distribution Manager Platform is a powerful, rules-based engine for today’s brokerages and financial intermediaries that aggregates, integrates and consolidates your firm’s sales and asset data providing clear, reliable, actionable information and insightful business intelligence. Get more answers through three innovative modular solutions:
Distribution Manager increases automation and reduces operational costs, solving multiple problems across the enterprise with one solution – while helping you to increase your profitability and reduce your compliance risk.
Leveraging mutual fund data for revenue collection, sales analysis and ensuring compliance continues to challenge the industry.
68% of firms execs are significantly concerned about potential lost revenues due to inaccurate invoicing or audit processes and nearly 50% of firms are worried about failing to collect fees on a timely basis.
Learn more in our new whitepaper, Managing Big Data: A Big Problem for Brokerages
This report is one of the few sources of information on the data management and analytical challenge that faces distributors of mutual fund investment products in the United States. It sets out the key distributor concerns, current industry practices and potential next steps.
Broadridge commissioned the report and worked with consultants, Patpatia & Associates, to run in-depth interviews with 50 executives at 25 firms across the industry, including large brokerages, banks, trusts and many medium-sized independent brokers, as well as retirement plan providers.
Sales and asset position data is critical to the success of mutual fund distributors, but managing this data is difficult to do well as it involves gathering, scrubbing and analyzing data on multiple investment products sold through different account types, as well as normalizing data taken from multiple third-party systems and reports (e.g., custodians, fund companies).
Interviewees told us the information challenge was getting more complicated and more critical. Since the financial crises of 2007/8, both markets and regulators have got tougher, so that distributors are obliged to disclose more information while trying to manage costs. Meanwhile, the types of sales channels and accounts through which funds are sold have increased, e.g., the industry trend towards fee-based accounts, and the number and type of investment products has proliferated.
Professionals think that poor data and analytics damage their firm in three key ways:
Currently, 65% of firms we spoke to accommodate some or all of their data and analytical needs by means of error-prone manual processing, typically employing 3-6 dedicated staff for a mid-sized firm with 1,500 to 3,000 advisors. Worse, 68% say they lost revenues due to inaccurate invoicing or difficulty in auditing fund company payments to distributors.
Some 20% of firms employ third-party vendor solutions, however, these are typically repurposed tools that may not have the desired analytical power, e.g., to segment advisors by branch, region, or production level, and may not incorporate key information, e.g., from revenue sharing agreements. Less than 15% of the interviewed firms have attempted to develop sophisticated proprietary platforms, only to find this to be narrowly focused or less than comprehensive, e.g., one system drew information from NSCC records and brokerage systems but could not capture fee-based accounts. In-house solutions can also be unexpectedly expensive to develop and maintain.
Around 74% of the firms expressed a strong interest in changing the way they approached the data challenge. Many were attracted to the concept of creating a centralized repository of fund sales and position data, where the data could be scrubbed once and then used repeatedly in different business contexts, but doubted if an individual firm could develop such an ambitious tool.
For more information visit Broadridge.com/distributionmanager. To learn more about Patpatia & Associates, visit Patpatia.com.