A number of UK investment platforms have suspended hundreds of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and investment companies as they fail to comply with new rules.
City A.M. reported on Tuesday that Hargreaves Lansdown had stopped taking money for 296 investment companies and around 1,200 ETFs.
These funds had not met the new Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products (Priips) regulation, which demands they produce a document explaining risks to investors.
But now Bestinvest and AJ Bell have also admitted that they have suspended a number of funds, and are still reviewing documentation.
A delay in implementation was perhaps inevitable, since the Priips rules were only actually finalised last September.
Read more: FCA asset management market shake-up: How the City has reacted
“Something that should have had 12 months as a transitional period ended up with a matter of weeks,” Ian Sayers, head of the Association of Investment Companies, told Reuters.
Asset managers have been especially busy trying to comply with another set of even bigger regulations, known as Mifid II, which came into force on Wednesday.
However, Hargreaves Lansdown said that funds were quickly becoming more compliant. The number of investment companies which had still not produced the required document by today has fallen since Tuesday from 296 to around 40.
Read more: Day of the Mifids: Controversial EU regulations for the asset management industry finally kick in
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