Fund industry veteran Hugues Gillibert has launched a new London-based mutual fund research company, FITZ Partners, specializing in fund fees and expenses calculations, which can be benchmarked against other funds.
“In the last couple of years, the fund industry has not been able to compare fund multiple operating fees in detail,” says Hugues Gillibert, chief executive of FITZ. “Although most funds disclose a top level Total Expense Ratio or Ongoing Charges Figure, until now no one could tell how those figures were arrived at.”
FITZ’ research covers over 13,000 fee calculations, and the costs reviewed include management, administration, custody, audit, professional distribution, transaction, performance and subsidy. The firm can also split fund expenses by share class in order to support investment decisions.
“Whether you qualify for an institutional, retail or the recently introduced ‘clean’ share, you will be able to measure each particular operating cost borne by that share class. Our goal is to give professional investors and institutions access to unique quality of data and add value to their due-diligence process. They will be in a better position to evaluate each and every cost paid out of a fund’s assets and take a view on how that fund is run from an operational perspective compared with its peers,” says Gillibert.
Aside from receiving interest from fund selectors, FITZ says its data is also being received by asset managers in Luxembourg, Ireland and the U.K., including cross-border groups such as AXA Funds Management and Fidelity International.
Prior to launching FITZ, Gillibert developed Fitzrovia International, a mutual fund research company that was acquired by Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company, in 2004.
Hugues Gillibert Launches Mutual Fund Research Firm
Fund industry veteran Hugues Gillibert has launched a new London-based mutual fund research company, FITZ Partners, specializing in fund fees and expenses calculations, which can be benchmarked against other funds.