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| Illustration: Paul Daviz |
Many costly man-hours have been expended determining exactly how asset managers in Europe should manage the research payment accounts (RPAs) that they will soon be required to set up under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid) II, the EU regulation that will unbundle research costs from execution and trading.
RPAs must be funded by specific research charges billed to asset managers’ end-client investors. The equity markets, which have traditionally paid for research as part of commission-sharing agreements (CSAs), will now have to fund the RPA using revised and stricter CSAs or set up a separate research charge to clients instead.
In fixed income, where the costs of research and execution have always been a blended part of the price of the security, the fiendish challenge of how to manage an RPA has become a billion-dollar question.
As the January 3 deadline to comply with the new rules looms, many asset managers appear to have found a straightforward answer to how to charge investors for the third-party research used in managing their money – don’t do it at all.
