Mining Prospectus Data 

• Melanie Waddell

As the SEC moves ahead with its plans for a summary prospectus for mutual funds, retirement plan providers, too, are under pressure to meet their fiduciary duties by offering better fund selection, monitoring, fee disclosure, and reporting. That's part of what propelled NewRiver, Inc. to develop FundPOINT Retirement Focus Data, a new prospectus-sourced data package for retirement plan service providers.
 
NewRiver  says FundPOINT Data is the only product to source mutual fund data from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings on EDGAR. It says its "Retirement Focus" data elements will enable recordkeepers, trust banks, administrators, consultants, RIAs, and broker/dealers to offer better fund selection, investment monitoring, plan disclosures, and transaction processing, the company noted in a release.

    Steven Powell, director of product management at New River, said in a recent interview that New River "is in a great position to provide information to these [retirement] plan service providers because we have access to the documents that are filed with the SEC. But also we extract data from those documents--the wealth of information that the fund issuers put into the prospectuses related to not only the fees of a particular investment, but revenue-sharing arrangements that they make available to people who redistribute their funds in 401(k) settings."

The Department of Labor (DOL), which oversees retirement plans, also plans to mimic the SEC's proposed summary prospectus rule. Len Driscoll, VP of product marketing at New River, says that Brad Campbell, assistant secretary of DOL's Employee Benefits Security Administration, speaking at the SPARK conference in Washington in early June, stated that he "would leverage off" of the SEC's current summary prospectus proposal and issue a rule within the next sixty days that would require that all plan "participants receive some type of summary document for any investment that they hold within a retirement plan."