A big challenge for mutual fund firms at this stage of the implementation regime may be the sheer quantity of documents that must be produced. Separate fund facts documents must be filed for each fund class or series.

“[Firms] have to produce a lot more within a compressed time frame,” says Patricia Rosch, president of Mississauga, Ont.-based
Broadridge Investor Communi-cations Solutions Canada. “There’s going to be new processes that are implemented to support the rule change.”

Broadridge offers services to help fund companies comply with the new rules, including an automated solution for the creation and delivery of fund facts documents.

Other companies also are offering services designed to help firms prepare their fund facts. Dublin-based investment data-management company MoneyMate offers a service to help firms collect, validate and standardize fund data to produce the new documents.

It’s a challenge for fund firms to ensure data are accurate and consistent across such a large volume of documents, says Conor Smyth, senior vice president of global sales at MoneyMate. “When [fund companies are] doing this themselves, it’s quite a chaotic situation,” he says. “They don’t do it very efficiently, nor is it done in a very controlled manner. We enable them to get in control of it.”

— MEGAN HARMAN