Industry Surveys

Barrington Partners has conducted industry-focused surveys for over 10 years. These surveys have started as one-off projects to help clients learn more about specific issues, and have evolved into regularly scheduled surveys that address costs, processing complexity and automation in different areas of operation. Generally the participants are tier 1 and 2 firms and they endeavor to:

  • Break down the cost structure of an operation and compare the breakdown across participants
  • Break down the issues that influence the complexity and cost of an operation
  • Consider the complexity of operations and compare them on an ‘apples to apples’ basis
  • Examine costs, staffing and pricing
  • Provide participant firms with a source for comparable analysis.

  • Intermediary Fee Survey 2012

    Intermediary Fee Survey 2012 (Upcoming)

    Intermediary payments are of increasing concern to fund groups, who must contend with myriad fee arrangements and very manual processes with multiple distributors.  The fourth edition of this survey  collects data on the different categories of intermediaries, the different payment approaches, and the different ways those payments are categorized.  It examines how advisors and fund companies divide the costs by looking at distributor categories, differing fee programs, and differing fee types.  The report also examines ideal class structures, how firms manages intermediary invoices, and other issues that impact firms today.

  • Dublin/Luxembourg Fund Survey 2012

    Dublin/Luxembourg Fund Survey 2012 (Upcoming)

    Mutual funds domiciled in either Dublin or Luxembourg comprise a significant position in the global mutual fund market.  Increasingly, fund managers and fund boards are interested in examining how their funds compare in a number of areas. Issues that can influence the comparison of one fund company and the next include different AUM, AUM per fund, average assets per account, levels of complexity of portfolio holdings, costs of custody by location, and the accuracy of NAV calculations. This Barrington survey uses analytic approaches we have already refined in comparing fund complexes on each of these issues. 

     

  • Transfer Agency Cost Survey 2011

    Transfer Agency Cost Survey 2011 (Recent)

    The survey seeks to describe the true costs of operating a transfer agency, differentiating among operations based on:

    • How costs break down in 10 categories within 7 distribution channels
    • How costs are affected by $ per account, basis points by channel and cost category.
    • Topical issues such as small account fees/account minimums, investor migration to more cost-effective channels, and capital investments.

    Each participant is benchmarked against all others around four primary issues:  costs, distribution, efficiency/automation and account minimums.

  • Fund Accounting Cost Survey 2011

    Fund Accounting Cost Survey 2011 (Recent)

    Fund accounting costs differ for many reasons between one fund company and the next.  Some of these differences include:  different amounts of AUM,  AUM per fund, number of classes, different types of securities, different locations, and out-sourced vs. in-sourced.  The Barrington survey uses a variety of approaches to effectively compare the costs of Fund Administration, NAV Calculation, Legal and Tax Preparation components of the process.

    This survey, our third of its kind, furnishes participating firms with benchmarks of their fund accounting costs compared to the other participants.

  • Institutional Accounting Cost Survey 2008

    Institutional Accounting Cost Survey 2008

    This survey considers the advisor level operational processing. This survey was developed with and sponsored by Fidelity Investments for the first time in 2008. The Portfolio Accounting processing area was broken down into the following areas:

    • Trade Processing
    • Portfolio Accounting
    • Security Master Maintenance
    • Corporate Actions
    • Reconciliation