1,946 key information documents, with the arithmetic shown

A key information document carries a summary risk indicator from one to seven, four performance scenarios and a table of costs, for a product that changes every day. The asset manager publishes one for every share class that it sells into the EU, and the regulation asks that each be refreshed at least every twelve months and whenever it becomes wrong.

The quarterly refresh was a spreadsheet exercise in four countries. Distributors, who must be able to rely on the indicator, queried it every quarter, and every query meant reconstructing a number from a file that someone had overwritten.

GraphAtlas PRIIPs computes the market risk measure from the Cornish-Fisher value at risk, runs the performance scenarios under the delegated regulation, and shows the arithmetic behind each cell of the document. The refresh is a run over the price history of each share class, and each document is stamped with the receipt of the run it came from.

Distributors receive the receipt with the document, and can reproduce the indicator with a tool of their own, which a growing number of them do on receipt.

The refresh of 1,946 documents runs in forty minutes, and product governance spends the two weeks it used to take on the products that changed. In the second quarter of this year the asset manager had no query about a risk indicator, against thirty-seven in the first.