Video
Focus on Funds: Investment Company Service Directory a Ready Reference to Vendors
Focus on Funds
Investment Company Service Directory a Ready Reference to Vendors
The January 23, 2015, edition of Focus on Funds offers a quick look at how the 2015 Investment Company Service Directory serves as a member resource in today’s increasingly international and electronic environment.
Transcript
Stephanie Ortbals-Tibbs, ICI Director, Media Relations: Welcome to Focus on Funds, the Investment Company Institute’s weekly roundup of industry news, ICI activities, and research findings.
The industry’s “yellow pages” is out. ICI’s latest edition of the Service Directory has been published. And I spoke with ICI Senior Operations Director Marty Burns about what this year’s edition has to offer.
Marty Burns, ICI Senior Director, Operations and Distribution: The Service Directory has been available now to Institute members for nearly 20 years. It is a ready resource for our Institute members as they need to either search for alternative service providers, or if they are in new lines of business and they need service providers. So, it gives them that one-stop shop when they need to find information about service providers across the mutual fund industry.
Ortbals-Tibbs: And this is not one or two categories of service providers. As I recall you telling me, it’s 144?
Burns: It is over 140 categories, and it encompasses services such as accounting and legal services; it includes operational services such as transfer agency or fulfillment (where people are sending out information to shareholders), and it now includes compliance services.
Ortbals-Tibbs: And as you continue to move this forward, there are two words that come to mind from what you’ve told me. One is that this is becoming more global, and—two—that this continues to be more of an electronic resource. Can you tell us about that?
Burns: The feedback we’ve gotten from Institute members is that they would like to have the information available to them basically 24 hours a day. So, a few years back, the Service Directory was moved to the web, so that the membership can get to it at any point in time right off of the ICI website, so that the members can search either by keyword, by company name, or by category. So there’s a lot of alternatives for them to gather the information that they are looking for.
Now, we still do have the hard copy. It acts as sort of a desk reference for those that are interested in that. But the feedback from the members was that they wanted to have the more ready access, and so the web version is really the source that most are going to today.
Ortbals-Tibbs: And the other driver for this is because our industry has gone so global, that when we talk about 24/7 it could be because people are in another time zone or another location. And you expect that eventually the service providers will also continue to pick up more and more of that cast.
Burns: The membership is becoming more and more global, and time zones are no longer really relevant. So, you need to be able to have access and you need to have access to information that will provide you a service provider, whether it be in Hong Kong or Los Angeles. And that is the goal of the Service Directory, as we move forward and make enhancements.
Ortbals-Tibbs: That’s this week in funds. See you next week.