Funds have become one of the fastest growing investment products in recent years, both due to the direct sale of secured vehicles or maturing debt and to the rise of management discretionary. But three out of four participants still do not know who actually manages the funds. According to the latest study prepared by the Inverco Observatory, Only 24% of participants know that behind this lies a professional team of managers.. The majority continue to believe they are responsible for the entity (36%), their financial advisor (14%) or the person who sold them the fund (14%). And there are still 11% who don’t even know how to answer this question.
Logically, the percentage of knowledge increases depending on the risk profile of the participants. This way, 45% of dynamic investors know that they are professional managers who manage the funds, a proportion which is reduced to 26% in the group of moderate investors and to 13% in the case of conservative investors.
These data are linked to the fact that banking entities remain the main channel for marketing and distributing funds in Spain. Actually, four out of ten participants personally take out these collective investment products in their usual bank brancha percentage which has increased by eight percentage points since the last study, carried out in 2022.
It should be noted that, despite the increase in financial advice in Spain in recent years, encouraged by the financial entities themselves through explicit billing for this service, the percentage of participants who hire investment funds through the through their personal advisor has fallen by more than half. for two years, going from 35% to 14% of those questioned, according to the Inverco Observatory study.
This decline has a lot to do with the fact that discretionary portfolio management has become the main means of contracting funds for almost one in four participants, while digital platforms are gaining importance and already 12% of participants in the study assure that they use to contract their investment products, taking into account that, above all, among participants with a higher risk profile, they tend to use various means to contract these vehicles.
This belief that it is the banking entity that manages the funds is correlated with the fact that only 32% of participants claim to have read the information brochure for the contracted products in detail, even if 51% claim to have gone through it. Likewise, in the most dynamic profiles, it increases to 44% and decreases to 26% among the most conservative.
