Online unit trust 'supermarket' now open for trading in HK
With the myriad of unit trusts available in the marketplace, it can sometimes be difficult for an investor to choose what is best for them and to meet desired financial objectives. But now there is a new online distributor of unit trusts available to Hong Kong investors, which has already proven to be a successful platform in Singapore.
Launched locally on July30, Fundsupermart.com boasts a comprehensive research database of many unit trusts, and offers a wide range of fund choices that cover different asset classes, regions, countries and sectors.
Patrick Ho, managing director of iFAST Financial Hong Kong, explains the new platform.
How is Fundsupermart.com different from the rest of the unit trust distributors in Hong Kong? In Hong Kong, unit trusts are usually offered as a supplementary investment product by the banks and brokerage houses to complement their other core product offerings such as bank deposits, stocks and so forth. At Fundsupermart.com, we are an online unit trust distribution platform that specialises only in unit trusts. We provide retail investors with access to extensive and in-depth unit trust-related research and content from our in-house research and content team. There is key financial information such as PE ratios for different stock markets, expected earnings growth of companies, government bond yields, and interviews with fund managers, as well as a host of useful web tools. There is also a wide offering of funds from 12 fund houses. You don't get this much specialised information from traditional channels.
How has the concept of a fund specialist worked for a market like Singapore, which shares similarities with the Hong Kong market? Fundsupermart.com started in Singapore in 2001. Since then, our business has grown tremendously and we are now the leading online distributor of unit trusts in Singapore. In the first half of this year, we recorded subscriptions excluding switching of S$459million (HK$2.36 billion). On a gross basis, Fundsupermart.com's unit trusts sales in the first quarter of this year were about 5 per cent of the entire unit trust market in Singapore, which is a phenomenal number for an online entity. Our online portal has been a huge success in Singapore. Besides specialised information, we offer lower sales charges and initiatives such as free switching. Our experience tells us that these things will strike a chord with unit trust investors in Hong Kong.
How does free switching work for investors? In addition to lowering the transaction costs incurred by investors by offering lower sales charges of 2 per cent and less for equity funds and bond funds respectively. We provide free switching to investors for funds within the same fund house, and 15 free switches a year for funds between different fund houses. This will save the customer a lot of money in fees.