Charcoal Online is preparing to launch a fund supermarket.
FundsHub will provide the online mortgage broker with a complete ready-to-run online fund supermarket. If the new service goes live before the end of the year the time-to-market will be somewhere around three months or less.
This type of outsourcing and white-labeling is an important development in the fast emerging European fund supermarket industry. It will allow companies with insufficient capital or expertise to quickly offer a fund supermarket, and yet retain their own brand. Over the next one to two years it could drive a sharp increase in the number of players competing for share of wallet from online fund distribution. While the current US fund supermarket industry has evolved over a period of 16 years, its European counterpart could begin to catch up in a relatively short period of time.
The speed with which financial services companies can now bring a live online fund supermarket to market means that smaller, new entrants can gain a fast-mover advantage over larger competitors that are slower to react. These smaller competitors will need this advantage in order to gain a foothold in this market, before the larger players capitalize on their operating scale and large customer bases.
