The clean shares revolution has not taken over, at least not yet.

BNY Mellon's Pershing, a clearing and custody giant for broker-dealers and RIAs, has added 1,400 clean shares (the team there prefers the term "triple zero" shares) since January 2017, when the SEC gave clean shares its blessing, confirms Rich Calvario, director of investment solutions at Pershing. As of the end of Q1 2018, clean shares account for less than two percent of the mutual fund assets that Pershing custodies.

Barron's and Seeking Alpha picked up on the Pershing data.

"The SEC's definition of clean shares and the uncertainty around the DOL fiduciary rule have left advisors content with choosing institutional shares as a viable product choice for the time being," Calvario states. "That said, despite the slow adoption so far, it is not unusual for new share classes to take many years before achieving broad adoption. So the jury is still out on triple zero shares."

Calvario and Justin Fay, director of financial solutions (who oversees alternative investments and ETFs on the platform), also highlighted a comeback of sorts for mutual funds in general. In Q1 2018, Pershing's custodial platform brought in $8 billion in net mutual fund inflows, up 68 percent year-over-year.

Mutual fund flows even beat out ETF flows on the platform. Pershing's platform brought in $6.2 billion in net ETF inflows in Q1 2018, down 14 percent year-over-year. (For the 12 months ending on March 31, 2018, ETFs brought in $29.5 billion in net inflows, up 25 percent, while mutual funds brought in $22.7 billion, up by a factor of four.) 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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