Toronto-based TD Asset Management Inc. (TDAM) announced on Tuesday that it’s lowering the annual management fees on select series of 45 mutual funds.
TDAM is also consolidating the various series available to high net-worth investors on certain TD mutual funds due to duplication resulting from the fee changes. TDAM will either be terminating specific series; closing the series to all purchases or to purchases by new investors; or converting the series to another series with the same fees and features. The affected series include Premium Series, Premium F-Series, K-Series and PS-series.
“There is a definite trend in the industry to becoming more competitive on fees,” says Dan Hallett, vice president and principal at HighView Financial Group in Oakville, Ont. “The fee reductions will narrow the pricing gap between various series and make some of them redundant. Consolidating the lineup makes things simpler and lowers the costs to TD, and ultimately to the client. Every series costs money to maintain.”
The fee reductions vary, depending to which series of a fund they are being applied. Some series are designed for the fee-based channel; other series are for the discount brokerage channel; while other series are differentiated by their distribution payouts.
Instead of maintaining an “alphabet soup” of funds that duplicate each other, consolidating funds in which one series now overlaps with another makes sense, says Hallett.
All terminating series of TD funds were closed to purchases at the end of Monday and will be terminated by March 28, 2017. Other changes will be implemented on or about March 28, 2017.
Click here for a complete list of the changes.
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