ACLI Blasts Market Timing Plan

Purchases, sales and exchanges are transmitted from customers to the life insurance company, he says, which, in turn, communicates the appropriate instructions to the underlying mutual fund.

Variable contract customers, Wilkerson says, do not have direct contact with the underlying mutual funds.

Thus, he says, while retail mutual funds can assess a redemption fee directly against their shareholders, variable contracts must assess the fee at the level of the separate account.

It would be extremely burdensome, he says, for insurers to allocate redemption fees at this level, particularly if the participants transactions did not involve actual market timing activity, but nonetheless triggered a mandatory redemption fee.

As for pensions, Wilkerson says many plans utilize an “open architecture” framework making options available to plan participants from multiple mutual funds.

Increasingly, he says, mutual funds have established redemption restrictions that are different from one mutual fund family to another and from fund to fund within the same family.

Most investments in employer-sponsored plans use omnibus accounts, Wilkerson says.

“The imposition of mandatory redemption fees at the omnibus account level would be difficult, if not impossible, to administer,” he says.

The SEC, Wilkerson says, should look at alternative ways of combating market timing that would not create competitive imbalances. For example, he says, fair value pricing or limitations on excessive transactions operate without discrimination across all product platforms.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, May 14, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.