Ant Battle Fund Commission Dispute: Whether The Exclusive Sale Is "IPO Self Sale" Or Not Needs To Be Strengthened

Recently, the news about the regulatory agency's investigation of ant strategic placement fund has been continuously fermented.

Prior to this, on September 25, five new funds under Huaxia Fund, e fund, Penghua Fund, China Europe Fund and huitianfu fund, which can strategically place ant group shares, were sold exclusively on Alipay ant wealth platform. Because it is the first innovative product, there has been constant controversy in the market.

Ant platform has made many innovations for this fund sale, including exclusive sales of strategic placement funds that can place their own stocks on their own platforms; placing orders 24 hours a day, not subject to the time limit of traditional trading funds.

At present, the focus of controversy is whether there is a conflict of interest between ant group, the main body of IPO, and ant fund sales company, which is the subsidiary of the exclusive sales agent of ant battle matching fund, and whether ant group underwrites its own IPO.

On October 14, ant group, in response to whether the ant war match fund violated the rules, said that the details of the strategic placement fund had been "fully disclosed" and that it had not underwritten its own IPO. As a strategic investor, the fund participated in the initial public offering of ant group, which has been operated independently by the fund company. In the follow-up interviews by our reporter, some institutional personages also expressed different views. Whether there is a conflict of interest remains to be investigated by the regulatory authorities.

Focus of dispute

According to the disclosure, five fund companies have signed strategic investor subscription agreements with ant group. The closing period of the five new funds for strategic placement is 18 months. It is planned that 10% of the assets of each fund will participate in the new shares placement of ant group. As 10% is the maximum allowed ratio of a single stock, the remaining 90% will be invested in other innovative targets.

Although only 10% plan to participate in the strategic placement of ant group, in the process of fund sales, ants have been taking "investing in ants" and "participating in the listing of ants" as the theme of fund sales. Superimposed on the background of ant's exclusive sale of these five strategic placement funds, the conflict is highlighted.

"Through their own channels of sales, for their own strategic placement funds in the open market, there is suspicion of stepping on the line. Moreover, if there is excessive publicity, how to define the separation of interests and how to protect the interests of investors are controversial. In the sales process of ant strategic placement fund, the exclusive sales of ant platform did not grasp the boundary A person from a fund company in Beijing said in an interview.

According to the measures for the supervision and administration of the sales agencies of public offering securities investment funds, which came into effect on October 1, the fund sales agencies should establish and improve the business scope control system, carefully evaluate the possible interest conflicts between the fund sales business and other businesses carried out or planned to be carried out according to law, and improve the prevention mechanism of interest conflicts.

As ant's exclusive sale of its strategic placement fund products is the first case in the market, how to interpret and define the rules behind the innovation still needs to be clarified.

"There is no conflict of interest. For example, there was a product sold exclusively by a bank before. If this fund buys bank shares, it will not be regarded as a conflict of interest. What's more, the amount of allotment is too small. From the perspective of scale, the scale of the five war matching funds is 60 billion yuan, and the top grid 10% subscribes for ant group shares, which is only 6 billion yuan. Even if the amount of money raised by ants is nearly $350 billion, it will have little impact on the total amount of capital raised by ants A public fund in South China believes that.

However, different from the previous exclusive sales products pointed out by the above-mentioned institutions, the selling point of these five funds is ant strategic placement, which has obvious particularity compared with the previous products.

"Whether there is a conflict of interest remains to be determined by the regulatory investigation. But in addition, ants in the process of fund sales more obvious problem is that the exclusive agency sales cooperation is not fair enough, the risk prompt is not enough. " An analyst of a securities company in South China told the reporter of the 21st century economic report.

Compliance awareness of tripartite platform needs to be strengthened

In addition to the conflicts of interest to be investigated, the lack of compliance training of third-party organizations and the serious interest orientation are also the main reasons for the current compliance problems.

In the measures for the supervision and administration of sales agencies of public offering securities investment funds, which came into effect on October 1, many regulations have been made on the business of fund sales agencies. Compared with the administrative measures for the sale of securities investment funds, this regulation, known as the strictest new sales regulation, is also a timely adjustment to the great changes in the fund market environment in recent years with the continuous deepening of the capital market reform.

In fact, the third-party sales agencies have been violating the rules.

The 21st century economic report reporter found that many platforms still have "red envelope" activities. Investors can get corresponding deductions when they buy funds after receiving them. There are also activities of drawing fund red envelopes through lottery.

In addition to the "red envelope" situation, the third-party fund sales agencies can not strictly comply with the line behavior in fund promotion materials. The 21st century economic reporter's previous investigation found that there were certain stampede behaviors in the relevant fund publicity materials on snowball's egg roll fund and wechat financial channel.

"Compared with the fund company's own publicity materials, some third-party sales agencies do have lower compliance standards for fund publicity materials. Some materials are even required by the third-party fund sales agencies, and we are reluctant to provide them, but now the channel is king, there is no way. " A public fund marketing department said frankly.