In the near future, Ucits funds will no longer be required to have a physical presence in the EU member state where they are marketed, which could lead to significant cost savings for UCITS fund managers.
This change is due to an amendment to the UCITS directive that came into force in July last year. EU member states have two years to transpose the amended directive into national law, which means these changes are likely to take effect in around Q3 2021.
Once these changes take effect, as a UCITS fund manager, all the functions currently carried out by your local office (or third-party provider) can be diverted to your website, but only if your website meets certain key criteria.
It’s easy to see how taking full advantage of this regulatory change can lead to significant cost savings, however, this is not a case where any website will do. In fact, the criteria your website will have to meet is very specific.
Website criteria
In a nutshell, for your company to comply with the new regulation, your website will have to:
- Provide investors with information on how subscription/redemption orders can be made and how repurchase, and redemption proceeds are paid;
- Facilitate the handling of information and access to procedures and arrangements relating to investor complaints and the investors’ exercise of their rights arising from their investment in the host Member State;
- Make the prospectus, (semi-)annual reports, issue, sale, repurchase or redemption price, the marketing communications, if any, and the KIIDs available for inspection and obtaining copies thereof;
- Provide investors with information relevant to the tasks that the facilities perform in a durable medium and;
- Act as a contact point for communicating with the competent authorities.
All these facilities need to be provided in one of the country’s official local languages or in a language approved by the host local competent authority.
This means that, to comply with these requirements, you will need an enterprise level digital experience management (DXM) platform, that will allow you to create compliant KIIDs and marketing documents, publish new content to your website easily, distribute key documents to your investors timeously – and do all of this securely and within the regulatory framework.
Creating an enterprise-level digital experience
With the Kurtosys platform you can create the enterprise-level digital experience required to comply with the new regulations and subsequently benefit from a cost-saving perspective – all while giving your investors the best possible user experience.
Key functionality of the Kurtosys DXM platform includes the ability to build a secure, compliant website easily without having to know how to code (or having to wait on developers to do this for you) – lowering costs and reducing business risk.
Kurtosys also enables you to easily translate your content (both for web and marketing documents) and provide all necessary information in the official local languages of the countries in which you operate – as is required by the Ucits directive amendment.
Furthermore, you can rest assured that the data on your website and in your documents is accurate and compliant at all times. Features such as Kurtosys Data Healthcheck helps you eradicate data issues before the information is published, while the Data module also allows you to push updated data to your website with the click of a button.
Kurtosys Data also integrates seamlessly with Kurtosys Documents, ensuring that your KIIDs and factsheets also contain the most recent, accurate information. What’s more, these up-to-date investor documents will be pushed to your website and online portals automatically as soon as they’re ready – ensuring data consistency across your platforms.
Lastly, through Kurtosys Communities you can provide secure, entitled access to specific documents relevant to individual investors.
With the Kurtosys end-to-end digital experience platform you can make the most of the UCITS directive change, lower your costs and achieve real growth – all while creating better investor experiences.
To find out more about the UCITS directive change and how Kurtosys can assist you in meeting the requirements, download our white paper on the topic now!
