Multifonds Survey: Most Fund Managers Ready for AIFMD

The Luxembourg-based vendor has published the result of its latest survey on the impact of the AIFMD on the fund industry in which 97 percent of respondents claim they will be ready by July 22, as opposed to only 46 percent who responded that way in April 2014.

The survey also highlights that fund managers are more concerned by the reporting tasks, with 66 percent citing this as their biggest challenge ahead of depository liability, operational requirements, and risk and liquidity management.

"As a regulation that came in response to the financial crisis in an attempt to regulate hedge funds, AIFMD seems finally to be emerging as a regulation that will bring some long-term benefits to the industry," says Keith Hale, Multifonds' executive vice president for client and business development. "While the outlook for AIFMD now looks more positive, regulatory reporting still presents an immediate challenge to firms that now need to report on a wider range of information. Fund managers must figure out how to marry their multiple systems together and then aggregate, store and report the resulting data. We found that only 33 percent of the fund managers responding have provisions in place so far for the reporting aspects of the directive, which suggests that while the outlook for AIFMD is positive, there is still work to be done to implement the regulation effectively."