Providing a wide geographical reach is important to ETF issuers, fund administrators and authorised participants (APs) alike, Funds Europe research shows.
Some 83% of fund-issuer respondents that took part in our survey said wide geographical reach was either very important or somewhat important, our research – in partnership with transaction network provider firm Calastone – found.
The data shows that geographical reach has more importance to the US issuers who responded to our survey: more of them answered ‘very important’ than ‘somewhat important’, whereas respondents who work for issuers in our European and Asian cohorts mainly selected ‘somewhat important’.
If American issuers do prize geographical reach more than those in Europe, this could be because branching out into the UK and the EU – let alone into the discrete markets of Asia – makes it imperative that any US issuer works with a geographically expansive service provider that is able to facility access to markets with contrasting regulatory regimes and disparate levels of process standardisation.
Are fund administrators aligned on the importance of geographical reach? Indeed, they are. These respondents mainly answered ‘very important’ to the question on the importance of geographical coverage.
Rob Rushe, global product head for ETF servicing at HSBC’s securities servicing business, says: “Geographical coverage is key for the ETF industry as it’s important that best practice is carried across markets and regions. We see this particularly with our Asia and European footprint, where there is more standardisation and automation of the ETF primary market in Europe compared to Asia.”
*Read the first part of our ‘ETF fund administration survey’ here.
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