This paper examines the unsound sales practices of funds which has
being grown rapidly and its trends of complaints and disputes relating to
retail fund sales through bank employee briefly. Today funds have offered
the best way for investors who have only modest amounts of money to
invest to obtain broad diversification and professional management. The
largest sale distributor of funds is shown as bank in Korea. In responding to
sales rapid growth, the disputes related to retail fund sales are being
increased fast.
Especially, although the sale of foreign funds is growing fast, the specific
risk of investment regarding foreign funds are not explained to the investors
in detail and in comprehensive manner. Individual investors are not
accustomed to foreign funds which have different risk taste compared with
domestic fund, including foreign currency exposure, political risk and so on.
This paper briefly reviews the fund sales performance and unsound
practices criticised often in recent days and what actions the law has taken to
those unsound sales practices and what change newly enacted law will take
and what additional actions the newly law should take for the benefit of
fund investors. According to the newly enacted law (named as The Capital
Market and Investment Service Provider Act), the bank will be treated as
investment service provider (broker) and various provisions in the law
applies to bank which sells various funds in the house. According to the
newly enacted law, especially the duty to explain about the investment risk applies to the bank. If as the investment service provider, bank does not
explain the investment risk to the individual investor, they should pay the
possible loss of principal amount invested to them.
My proposal in this article fells into two basic categories. First, as a
regulatory proposal, new regulation specifically should address unsound
promotion like strong recommendation and prediction without reasonable
basis. Second, bank should improve fund sales practices. Bank management
should adopt a framework to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and
ensure effective supervision of individuals engaged in sales activities.
Regulatory goal should be to enable and encourage investors to make better
fund purchase decisions and to enhance the ability of market forces to
discipline costs.