New German Reg Prompts PIB Data Products

SIX Telekurs and Interactive Data are stepping up their rollouts of new data services that provide information on financial products to investors, both of which were launched this summer in response to new German regulations requiring firms to provide supporting information packs—dubbed Produktinformationsblätter, or PIBs—on investment products.

Under the German Investor Protection Improvement Act (AnSVG), which came into force in July 2011 after being passed by the country’s Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, German banks and issuers of financial products are now required to provide product information sheets to investors for all their investment products.

Like the Key Investor Information Documents (KIIDs) mandated under UCITS IV to provide standardized product information for funds, the PIBs are standardized documents of two or three pages that provide comprehensive information on the risks, costs and earnings of financial products, to enable investors to more easily compare financial instruments.

At last week’s Frankfurt Financial Information Summit, Raimund Kaufman, account manager at SIX Telekurs, said the vendor has already rolled out its Produktinformationsblätter Service at a number of German financial services companies, including HSBC Trinkaus.

Telekurs’ PIB Service, which is targeted mainly at German and Swiss clients, “is a document management portal that grants access to PIBs, which are populated by SIX Telekurs using data from the vendor’s VDF database and are available in German, French, Italian and English, for all instruments in the SIX Telekurs universe,” Kaufman told delegates. “The database is stored in two datacenters and can be accessed via a web login or integrated into the bank’s workflow … and firms can mirror the archive in their own datacenter by Secure File Transfer Protocol.”

Interactive Data has also launched a PIB data product, after identifying the need for the service in early 2010, though the information in its product is provided by issuers rather than sourced by the vendor, according to Michael Diefenthaeler, director of business development and consulting at Interactive Data.

“We went a different route because … since this is part of the legal documentation for each investment product out there, most of the banking institutions have an interest in providing the information themselves,” Diefenthaeler says, though he acknowledges that some financial firms will prefer to use external resources rather than rely on their own information.

Like Telekurs, Interactive Data will store the documents in a 10-year archive and integrate the PIB database into clients’ existing workflows. “If you take a typical advisor workflow, once a decision has been made on the instruments that an investor wants to populate the portfolio with, the advisor will then need to provide legal documentation about asset allocation, and also PIBs for those instruments. From a technical point of view, there will be a link to the PIBs they need, which is generated in the second that the advisor is printing the documents,” Diefenthaeler adds.