Ask five people in a factsheet sign off what belongs on page one, and you’ll get five different answers. I’ve sat through that exact disagreement more than once. Everyone agrees the factsheet matters. Almost nobody agrees on what makes one good.
Fund factsheets are one of the most visible documents in investment management. For a lot of investors, it’s the only thing from a fund manager they’ll ever actually read. And most of them are still built to survive a compliance review, not to earn a second look.
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud in that sign off meeting: a factsheet can pass compliance and still fail the reader completely.
We looked at what the best factsheets actually do differently
We benchmarked a sample of factsheets across leading investment managers globally. The pattern wasn’t subtle.
- Objective and key facts sit on page one, every time. The best-in-class factsheets put performance data right alongside them. Disclaimers and long commentary move further back, where they belong.
- The layout doesn’t change from page to page. Consistency reads as trust. Investors notice when it’s missing, even if they couldn’t tell you why.
- Accessibility gets treated as a requirement, not an afterthought. We found colour contrast failures, non compliant font sizes and missing annotations for screen readers on factsheets from firms who’d never let that slide anywhere else in the business. Is that a design failure or a compliance failure? Fair question. Right now, it’s usually both.
- Investor centric features stand out. A photo of the fund manager, a risk indicator placed where you’ll actually see it, a glossary that assumes the reader is smart but not a specialist. Small things. They change how a document feels to hold.
- Two pages isn’t a rule any more, it’s a hangover. Firms limited factsheets to two pages because investors printed double sided and lost page three. Nobody prints double sided any more. Clinging to two pages in a digital first world means cramming or cutting, and neither is good enough.
What that looked like for one client
I want to be careful with this one, because it’s an easy claim to make and a harder one to earn. A global investment manager based in the UK came to us with factsheets that were functional but outdated: dense tables, inconsistent logos, colour combinations that failed basic accessibility checks, and the details investors actually needed buried three pages in.
Our design and reporting teams audited their materials against leading global peers, using AI assisted analysis alongside accessibility testing. From there, the fixes were specific, not cosmetic: objective and performance moved to page one, colour contrast and typography brought up to standard, risk indicators and fund manager context built in more visually, commentary trimmed into a layout flexible enough to work across fund types.
The client’s own word for the result was “a complete step change.” It’s now the standard across their product range.
Are factsheets still relevant?
Yes and no. Mostly yes, if I’m honest, but the reasons why have changed completely.
Ten years ago a factsheet was a static summary, built once and left alone until the next reporting cycle. Investors and regulators still want it: a trusted snapshot they can download, compare and file away, something that holds its own next to a portal rather than trying to replace one. What’s changed is the bar. A factsheet now has to be visual, dynamic and accessible, or it reads as behind the market it’s reporting on.
Why we built our factsheet tooling around this, not around the data
A lot of the tooling behind factsheets grew out of a data business, and reporting got bolted on afterwards. You can usually tell. The numbers are right, but the document reads like an export, not something written for the person holding it.
That’s the gap our fund factsheets tooling closes: standardised, on brand templates that pull straight from your source data, so getting it right and getting it out fast stop being a trade off. If you’re automating this for the first time, the honest answer to “how long will it take” is that it depends on how clean your source data already is, not on the software.
None of this gets solved once and left alone. Regulation moves. Investor expectations move faster. There isn’t a version of the factsheet that’s finished, and I’d be careful of anyone who tells you otherwise.
So look at your own page one. If you were the investor reading it, not the person signing it off, would it hold your attention past the first paragraph?
