1 Fund Setup Hierarchies

This topic provides information on setting up fund hierarchies stage.

After you have set up reference data that you will use to operate your funds, you must define the funds in the system, and set up the rules that each fund will be governed by. These rules will be automatically applied by the system whenever you enter a transaction into the system that has been requested by an investor into the fund.

A fund is, typically, a money pool that is accumulated through the contributions of persons who are interested in investing their capital in this manner, with a view to obtaining either steady incomes with periodic returns or steady appreciation of the capital. These interested persons are typically called investors or unit holders.

The fund gives the investors an acknowledgment of their stake in the money pool by issuing units to them, and invests their contributions into the securities market. The returns earned by the fund on this investment is distributed to the investors either in the form of dividends when a dividend is declared by the fund administrators, or in the form of capital appreciation when the investors sell their holdings back to the fund.

Funds can be of various types depending upon their processing guidelines, their expected returns for the investor, pricing guidelines, and so on. Therefore, funds will differ widely in any or all of these characteristics.

Funds differ widely in any or all of the following:

  • Operational guidelines
  • Investment offer patterns
  • The structure of the fees and other loads that are charged or the incentives that are given.
  • Pricing policies: The price of the fund on a given business day is known as the NAV (Net Asset Value) for the fund. It is a measure of the net worth of a single asset (or unit) in the fund. It is also the rate that is available to the investors at which they may buy into the fund or sell out of the fund, at any given time.

The fund price is a reflection of the value of the assets in the fund, and so it is rarely constant. Depending upon the frequency at which the fund administrators declare this price, funds may be, accordingly, either pre-priced or post-priced.

  • Certificate guidelines: Some funds give investors certificates representing their holdings in the money pool. Such funds are known as scrip-based, certificate-based or simply, certificate funds. Some funds only give the investors an acknowledgment of their holdings, in terms of the number of units held and their prevalent value. Such funds are termed scrip-less funds.

Funds could also be grouped together based on common investment options, either as fund families or as umbrella funds.

Sometimes, asset managers create a tree-structure of associated funds, which may be similar in their investment options. Investors are allowed to invest in any level of the tree-structure. Such fund structures are called umbrella funds.

This topic contains the following sub-topics: