Boston-based data provider Financial Research Corp. (FRC)  has decided to stop providing fund flows data to the media that identifies companies by name — figures that while closely watched were a source of constant irritation to some firms.

News reports based on the monthly data by FRC, part of Citigroup, had rankled Fidelity and some other fund companies because the figures excluded money market fund flows and only included flows of stock and bond funds.

Over the past few years, Fidelity and other asset managers reported robust inflows into money market funds but received bad press because the FRC data excluded those figures.

For example, FRC numbers showed that Fidelity saw outflows of $9.9 billion in January.
But the world’s biggest mutual fund company reported inflows of $14.4 billion that month, driven by money market fund inflows of $20.3 billion.

That nuance was often lost in headlines focusing on FRC’s bond and stock fund flow data — figures that had become industry benchmarks.

Putnam Investments, the Boston-based unit of Canada’s Power Financial Corp, has regularly topped FRC’s list of companies seeing the biggest outflows.

FRC may provide the firmwise data to companies as a paid service.

Other companies which track fund flows include Strategic Insight, Emerging Portfolio Fund Research and Lipper Inc, a unit of Thomson Reuters.

Photo credit: Reuters

“The fund industry has to make a real commitment, not lip service, to diversity. And really go out of our way to find people of color to work in our organizations,” Ariel president Mellody Hobson told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.

Ariel has long championed the cause of spreading financial literacy in the African-American community. Founder John Rogers is helping raise support and funds for Barack Obama.

“Name any well-known black portfolio manager besides John Rogers,” Hobson said on the sidelines of the annual Investment Company Institute (ICI) conference. “And, to our knowledge, I am the only black woman chair of a mutual fund board. That’s not progress,” she said. Hobson chairs the board of trustees of Ariel’s mutual funds.

Rogers is chairman, CEO and chief investment officer of Chicago-based Ariel, which had $11 billion in assets under management at the end of March.

“We, as an industry, have a very very very long way to go. And I think it’s more disconcerting when you look at private equity, when you look at hedge funds, there’s no diversity at all,” Hobson added.

Some senior executives of the $11.7 trillion U.S. funds industry agreed with Hobson’s view on the lack of diversity.

“I think it varies by the types of roles. I think among the investment management professionals, there is less diversity than all of us would like,” said Edward Bernard, vice chairman of T. Rowe Price Group