Breaking the barier

By the end of November, investment funds in Poland gathered assets worth zł.95 billion. If last month's growth trend of 6.7 percent continues in December, the psychologically significant barrier of zł.100 billion will be surpassed.

"I'm happy to admit I was wrong when at the beginning of the year I predicted that we would reach the zł.100 billion mark in about two years," says the president of the Chamber of Fund and Asset Management (IZFA), Marcin Dyl. Since the beginning of the year, the assets of investment funds have increased by zł.33.7 billion, which represented a 55-percent growth.

However, the industry is worried about the merging of the three financial-market regulators into the Financial Supervisory Commission (KNF). Deputy Finance Minister Piotr Soroczyński claims that the creation of one regulator is a logical step in today's world. "We have a product that contains elements of products from different segments, thus a classic regulator would have trouble supervising it," he claims. "It's better for the regulator to have experience from all sectors."

Deputy chairman of the KNF, Marcin Gromoła, looks to calm the industry's worries. "We don't want to be a policeman and a judge," he said.

But Dyl warns that if the supervision is too rigorous and market conditions unfavorable, fund-management companies will simply move to countries that are more investment-fund friendly, notably Luxembourg. Dyl explains that while in Luxembourg the official period for registering a fund is six months, it actually takes between just two weeks and one month to do it. "In Poland it is the other way around. Officially it's two months, but in practice it takes between four and five months," he said, adding that a three-month difference is significant in his business.