GERMANY - Rating agency RCP & Partners has launched a new online tool enabling retail and institutional investors to obtain detailed information about asset managers and their products in either English or German.

According to RCP, asset managers participating in the website can provide information on up to 12 products or asset classes. This information includes performance data, investment processes and contact details which the investor can download.

“The idea behind the website is for the asset managers to provide enough information so that investors can do a proper first screening of them,” said Shane Norman, RCP’s representative in London.

According to RCP, 10 asset managers have already agreed to participate in the new website. Among them are Fidelity, Société Generale, Union Investment, F&C and Erste Spar Invest.

In exchange for participating, RCP said asset managers would be charged 2,000 euros for the first year of their membership. Thereafter, the cost would be based on the number of times that each asset manager’s information was downloaded, it said.

On its website, still in the test phase, RCP said the point of the site was to provide investors with “a central pool of data about asset management companies and their investment processes to support their information and selection process”.

RCP warns, however, that it neither verifies nor evaluates the information provided by the asset managers, adding that it only does this as a part of its mainline business of scrutinising and rating asset managers.

RCP, based in Wiesbaden, has so far assigned ratings to 13 asset managers, including several top houses in Germany. It also has assigned ratings to two “master fund” products.

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