Mining Prospectus Data

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."