Investment management firm Franklin Templeton has hit out at research that claimed literature for one of its funds was over three months old.
Instinct Studios, a digital communications firm, published research last week that said 92% of fund factsheets from firms surveyed contained performance data that is at least a month and a half out of date.
The firm analysed fund factsheet PDFs for some of the UK’s largest fund groups on their websites in January 2015 and found that most providers had last updated their factsheet information in November 2014.
For the Franklin Templeton Global Total Return (TGTR) fund, the latest information was claimed to be even older. But Franklin Templeton has pointed out that a hyperlink provided by Instinct Studios to a factsheet was wrong.
“The TGTR fund factsheet did not show September 2014 data as per the Instinct Studios press release,” a Franklin Templeton spokesperson says. “Our factsheets are uploaded on a monthly basis – usually around 10-12th business day after month end – which is not an unreasonable timeframe for our investors.”
Jeremy Mugridge, a spokesman for Instinct Studios, says: “The information relating to the Franklin Templeton Global Total Return Fund should have been dated 30 November 2014, not 30 September 2014 as originally reported.
“But regardless of this, in today’s digital age there is no excuse for publishing information that is out of date, whether that information is three months, one month or even two weeks old. Markets move quickly and so should fund group reporting.”
Instinct Studios says some leading fund providers are failing the Financial Conduct Authority’s transparency test due to out of date information.
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