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By Erin Bardua

Recently, the Mandatory Standards Committee met to discuss which ESG V16 standards would be required for minimum compliance. The committee carefully considers the effect of each change on the industry, and the value of the change in cases where mandatory compliance will assist with industry-wide usage and increase benefit. In response, FundSERV customers must review the mandatory standards as part of their ESG analysis, and lobby their system vendors for any missing pieces.

Manufacturers will have until December 2005 to comply with non-N$M V16 standards, with the exception of NFU messaging responses. All messages must generate a response record within one business day of receiving the message. If the manufacturer returns an accepted response, this indicates that they have completed and processed the message. This requirement, as well as any standard that affects N$M, is mandatory as of June 2005.

First time for mandatory distributor standards

All the distributor mandatory standards that were published with V15 will take effect at the time of the V16 implementation in June 2005. This is the first time the mandatory standards have been applied to distributors. These functions are all available via FundSERV and the FundSERV Services Screens, and have been mandatory for manufacturers for some time.

Below is a summary of the requirements for distributors as of June 2005; see the mandatory standards documentation in Helpfile V16 under Business and Technical Papers, Processing Guidelines, for all the information that applies to you.

Cancel order: Same-day order cancellations (Action Code = CAN) for all orders placed via FundSERV must be placed electronically. Manufacturers will not accept fax or telephone requests to cancel orders placed via FundSERV.

Internal transfers from one nominee to another nominee within the same distributor must be placed as orders through FundSERV.

Letter of Indemnity: As-of transactions (Action Code = AOT), and reversal transactions (Action Code = REV) that can be placed electronically must be sent via FundSERV. LOIs will not be accepted for these corrections.

Electronic files: Distributors must access data from the standard format files (currently AF, AS, and AW) provided by the manufacturer via FundSERV. Manufacturers will no longer generate paper reports for these files.

NFU messaging: All distributor requests for the non-financial messages already mandatory for manufacturers (AddModAddress, AddModClientInfo, ModAcctAttrib) must be sent electronically via FundSERV. Manufacturers will no longer accept changes from distributors that are provided outside of non-financial messaging. This includes mail, fax, e-mail, and paper requests. Client name account updates are exempt as they require client documentation.

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