Pershing: Mutual Fund Inflows Show Major Increase in Q1 2018

BNY Mellon’s Pershing is announcing that net inflows to mutual funds on the Pershing platform reached $8 billion in the first quarter of 2018, a 68 percent increase compared to the same period in 2017, pointing to a renewed interest among financial professionals in mutual funds. The data is compiled from 1,400 Pershing clients, 28.7 million individual positions, $650 billion ETFs and mutual fund assets under custody. Pershing also saw a slowdown in ETF flows during the same period. Inflows into ETFs on the Pershing platform were at $6.2 billion in the first quarter of 2018, a decrease of about 14 percent compared to the prior year.Almost all of the $8 billion inflows into mutual funds in the first quarter of 2018 went into institutional shares, which usually have the lowest expense ratio of all share classes and typically don’t require sales charges. In the 12 months ending March 31, 2018, outflows from class A, B, C, and retail no-load shares have exceeded $10 billion, according to a Pershing representative, who added that advisors have been slow to adopt clean shares. Meanwhile, an article from Morningstar seeks to add some clarity to the murkiness around clean shares. Morningstar says it will now describe such shares as bundled, unbundled or semi-bundled. “The heart of our idea is to describe the service-fee arrangement and shed light on what an investor pays for, whether it’s directly (say, by writing a check to an advisor) or indirectly (via a fund’s expense ratio),” according to the article.