The Mutual Fund industry is taking off in Nigeria, with rapid growth recorded during 2020. Investors increasingly want to build their savings with professional Mutual Fund managers rather than saving their money in banks. For all this, however, the aggregate assets under management (AUM) of Nigeria’s Mutual Funds are still only 14% the size of its Pension Funds. The industry is at a critical point in its development as it requires several more years of rapid growth to become a true force in Nigeria’s financial infrastructure.

In this report we put ourselves in the position of a saver wishing to create a pot of money by investing in Fixed Income funds. And, not unnaturally, our saver wishes to compare the performance of these funds (even though past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance). Following this line of enquiry we gathered material from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Fund Managers Association of Nigeria and from the funds themselves.

What we found is that data are not comparable. Performance data for 2020 vary widely, but this is unlikely to be due to the different strategies of the different funds. Rather, it is because different funds report their data differently. This leaves our saver – and all investors – in a difficult position, without the information required to take an informed decision.

In our opinion, this issue needs to be fixed. In many markets around the world, the Morningstar service and the Financial Times Managed Funds service provide accurate and comparable data on thousands of funds, creating confidence and engagement with millions (if not hundreds of millions) of investors. Such a service is required in Nigeria

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