The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will consider a proposal this year that would sweep away regulatory barriers to launching certain types of exchange-traded funds, a senior official revealed at the Reuters Global Wealth Management Summit.
Norm Champ, director of the SEC’s Division of Investment Management, said that a move to simplify procedures for approving ‘plain vanilla’ ETFs would help the industry and the agency use its resources wisely.
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"I’m now spending in my division the time of lots of people to review these plain-vanilla applications," said Champ.
He added that the SEC has been giving new ETFs what it terms ‘exemptive relief’ from requirements of the Investment Act of 1940 on a case by case basis.
"But by defining in advance the kinds of funds that would get that relief, the commission could save itself time," Reuters quoted him as saying.
However, Champ declined to go into detail about what those guidelines might look like.
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By GlobalDataThe $1.5 trillion ETF industry has been growing at breakneck pace, tripling its assets since 2008, according to data from Lipper, a research unit of Thomson Reuters Corp. The move to streamline the application process could lead to lower costs for shareholders.
