The importance of intermediary payments continues to grow as many fund groups now find that Intermediary Fee Payments are greater than 50% of all transfer agency expenses, and for some the percentage is over 70%. Fund companies have to contend with a myriad of fee arrangements with different distributors and a very manual billing process. Additionally, programs vary between basis point programs, dollar per account programs and a combination of payment programs.
This survey collects data on the different categories of intermediaries, the different payment approaches, and the different ways those payments are categorized. The survey also considers the most expensive programs and how there may or may not be differences or limitations in how a fund board has agreed to reimburse an investment advisor.
Barrington Partners state that they are using more advanced methods of compiling data that will allow to produce a tailored version of the results for each participant, highlighting your data marks. Each participant will receive an electronic copy of the survey in PowerPoint for use with board and/or management reports. The links to the spreadsheets will be broken prior to sending the reports to participants.
The final document will be organized as follows:1.Introduction and Participants2.Benchmarks: this section shows key data points ranking each participant against the group. This approach provides an easy-to-understand presentation of the fundamental measures in the survey.3.Analysis: this section provides comparisons of different sets of data for further introspection and correlation analysis.4.Question by Question Results: this final section will simply show answers in the same order as the questions, making it possible for participants to easily reference data within the report.
Barrington Partners last completed its survey on Intermediary Fees in 2008.
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