MAKING THE MOST OF UCITS IV

paying agent and a local information agent if you wish to market your funds in Germany or Switzerland, whereas in France you will be requested to appoint a centralising agent.

You will have to define a precise distribution strategy and have a clear view on which products are going to be marketed in which country through which distribution channels. This will require a strict selection and monitoring of the distributors you are going to involve in your fund distribution. NOTIFICATION PROCEDURE, KIID PRODUCTION & MAINTENANCE AND LOCAL DISTRIBUTION RULES Once you will have defined the target countries where you want to market your UCITS, you will have to face additional challenges to implement your distribution strategy. First of all, you will have to request the registration of your UCITS in the target distribution countries by using the UCITS IV simplified notification process. It should be noted that you will have to comply with local marketing and distribution regulations in the host Member State .As such, you might have to cope with different local distribution requirements when marketing your UCITS in various countries. Producing and distributing the KIID will be a real challenge since it will have to be translated in the language of the country of distribu- tion and any material change within the fund will require prompt revision of the document. It will inherently necessitate a timely notification to all regulators where the fund is registered for cross-border distribution and throughout its distribution network. Outside the EU, the KIID might not be recognised by local authorities such as in Hong Kong and Singapore, where you will have to produce other “KIID-like“ documents (respectively the KFS and PHS).

You will have to comply with a number of registration duties, local distribution and marketing rules. It will require a real expertise regarding international distribution of UCITS.

POST-REGISTRATION DUTIES Once funds are registered, another key challenge will be to maintain that registered status in the various countries of distribution. You will have to cope with a series of specific financial reporting, statistical reporting and publication requirements, with specific formats differing from one country to another and translation requirements. Thus, in Germany and Austria, you will have to provide a specific and complex tax reporting if you want your foreign funds to be fiscally as attractive as domestic funds to local investors. Hence the ability of your fund to calculate the relevant figures, such as the publication at each NAV date of the “Aktiengewinn” (equity gain), “Zwischengewinn” (in- terim profit) and “Immobiliengewinn” (real estate profit) in Germany for fully transparent funds and deliver the relevant tax information to investors via financial data providers and financial newspapers will be crucial to avoid heavy taxation of investor. You will also have to comply with specific EU rules such as the Savings directive, which requires paying agents making cross-border interest payments to EU individuals to obtain and verify certain information about those individuals and either to report information about the in- terest payments to their domestic tax authorities or levy withholding

Lastly, depending on the target countries of distribution, you might have to appoint local agents. For instance, you will have to appoint a local

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