Keeping focus

This week is about keeping focus, but focusing on a number of things, as we have a wide range of products under our lens. Natixis’s Nick Elward tells us that more financial advisers are talking about if they are going to invest in active ETFs, they want to know it’s a concentrated product with significant positions in securities which the PM has high conviction.

ETF issuer Teucrium has high conviction on agricultural commodities, but Jake Hanley, managing director, tells Fiona Nicolson that the firm’s focus is ‘to broaden awareness of the fact that we’re not just an agriculture ‘shop’.’

We also bring you news this week of a new white labelling offering from Switzerland, in the digital assets space, with our interview with Bruce Jackson, alternatives fund administrator Apex’s Chief of Digital Assets. The firm has launched Issuance.Swiss AG, with Jackson and digital asset veteran Laurent Kssis on the board. First product has just arrived and more are planned. The firm is also tokenizing alternative institutional funds to enable the smaller investor to take part.

Fee compression, as predicted by Jackson and Kssis, has continued in the US, with State Street’s Jeff Sardinha’s prediction in our crypto podcast that Grayscale would launch a new bitcoin ETF coming true and VanEck joining the crowd with a waiver of fees for its bitcoin trust HODL.

To listen to the latest episode of Off The Record please click here.

All these free products coming down the line for US investors must have their impact somewhere and we have the timely Calastone study on the changing face of ETF administration. According to Calastone’s white paper, the lack of progress around automation, particularly around the creation and redemption process in the primary market, has been raised by clients of asset servicers as being a problem.

57.6 per cent of issuers said the creation and redemption process was the most important factor when measuring the success of their ETF fund administration services.

41.4 per cent of issuers said that the creation and redemption process was one of the two areas of ETF servicing most in need of improvement.

Next week sees us opening the nominations for the ETF Express Canadian ETF Awards service providers. Watch the site and nominate your favourite ETF service providers in Canada.

Beverly Chandler, Managing Editor

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