Hargreaves said it had removed around 240 investment trusts and about 900 ETFs from its platform, the majority of which are domiciled in North America.
The delisting will affect US nationals who plan to return home, as investing in such products is a cheap way for them to save for retirement, according to a report in the Financial Times newspaper.
The introduction of the packaged retail insurance-based investment products (Priips) regulations is intended to give investors greater transparency, as it requires each fund to have a Kid available online as of 1 January 2018.
Funds that failed to provide a Kid have been suspended.
Not alone
Hargreaves is by no means the only firm to suffer suspensions, as Bestinvest also temporarily pulled the plug on three trusts last week.
A spokesperson for the company said: “We use a third-party data vendor to supply links to the Kids prior to a purchase. We are working with our data vendor to identify cases where Priip-compliant documentation is not in place and, where this is the case, we have and will temporarily suspend access to dealing in these.
“The situation is incredibly fluid as trusts have been rapidly supplying these over the last couple of days. We will be checking with our data supplier which new Kids have come in and which remain absent throughout the day.”
However, the spokesperson added that the impact of the new regulations on Bestinvest will not be as great as Hargreaves Lansdown as “most of those removed from [the Hargreaves] platform were US domiciled ETFs and investment companies which we did not offer access to in the first place”.
Cracking down
An AJ Bell spokesperson confirmed they have not yet suspended any funds, but insisted they were also cracking down on funds not complying with the regulation.
The firm said: “We are reviewing all investment trusts and ETFs on the platform and requesting the required disclosure documents from them.
“Any that don’t provide the documents required by the Priips/Mifid regulations will be removed from the platform.”
