Volunteer Story - James Chu, CFA

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James Chu, CFA
Director, Tricio Investments Advisors


Volunteer Group: PRIIPS consultation working group
This group was a small, short term working group created to respond to an ESA consultation on the topic of PRIIPS KID. See the response here.


How has your experience helped the working group?
I was working for a company that manufactured and issued structured products in the UK retail market. This type of investments is classed as a PRIIP. Therefore, I have been working on implementing systems and processes for the company when PRIIPS regulation first came out in January 2018. I was delighted to see the CFA Institute and the CFA UK were responding to the consultations on PRIIPS. I believed that my experience and working knowledge on PRIIPS would help contributing to the response. Hence, I decided to volunteer for the working group, hopefully adding some input from a practitioner’s angle.

What have you learnt from your volunteer peers?
There were two things I learnt. The first is technical knowledge from my peers. We all had different backgrounds and experience, looking after different types of investments covered by the PRIIPS regulation. I learnt a lot from the peers who were managing different asset classes like close ended investment trusts, private equity and fixed income securities.

Secondly, I learnt about the need to communicate effectively. We only had one face-to-face meeting and one conference call. To make our collective effort more effective, we have to prepare well and coordinate among ourselves via email. This practical project management experience is very useful for me.

Why are these responses important? 
I think it is too early to say what are the actual impact, as we are yet to see any changes (if any) will be made on the regulations. Nevertheless, it is important for the CFA Institute to raise key concerns on performance analysis and cost disclosure, especially since some of these provisions in the PRIIPS regulations contradict those in MiFID II and UCITS regulations.

There has been some misunderstanding that the CFA Institute only cares about institutional fund managers and institutional clients. By participating in this consultation, the public can see that the CFA Institute also cares about regulations that are set up for retail investments.