ARTICLE: LUIS RIVERA
TRANSPARENCY IN FINANCIAL SERVIC - A NAIVE ASPIRATION? by Luis Rivera, Co-Founder & CEO | ETFmatic.com
Prior to building ETFmatic I had never worked in Financial Services. My experience included many years as a Management Consultant for Private Equity and Multinational companies, so I was no stranger to how things work in the sort of companies investors bet their savings on. Our Industry is Broken The Financial Services Industry has, step by step, earned the awful reputation it deserves. I don’t find it acceptable that so many retail customers pay half of their returns to fees simply because most of the innovation the industry has sought has been around how to screw their clients.
But my relationship with the Financial Services industry was shaped by my horrible experiences as a customer: paying endless fees that seemed to appear out of nowhere and how I was treated by as-unpleasant-as-they-come support teams. And above all, the lack of the kind of sensible approach towards Portfolio
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Management that is taught in Business Schools but is unavailable to retail customers because key financial concepts are not included in our educational systems. All of this is further made worse by the reach of unsustainable marketing budgets in an industry where change is long overdue.
Too much of what happens every day makes good professionals feel ashamed of “the best they can do for their clients” and loops regulators into a perpetual game of cat & mouse against companies suffering market forces that misalign them with their customers. Lack of transparency is a key enabler of all this nonsense. In the United Kingdom we are lucky to benefit from a data driven Regulator that seeks to im-
The Transparency Times | www.transparencytaskforce.org | October 2016 | Edition #6