The teams at five asset managers may be breaking out some champagne this week, thanks to new rankings from the folks at two investing publications.

Abigail "Abby" Pierrepont Johnson FMR (dba Fidelity Investments) Chair, President, CEO

Yesterday, the teams at Investor's Business Daily (IBD) and MarketWatch (both of News Corp's Dow Jones) unveiled their list of the top 30 Most Trusted Financial Companies in 2023. With help from TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, from May through July the IBD and MarketWatch folks polled 7,597 consumers to come up with the list.

The list covers eight different business categories, including "ETF/fund companies." The fund firms that landed on this year's list include:

Fidelity at rank 2 (also ranks 1 and 6 for other business lines);

Charles Schwab at rank 8 (also at ranks 5, 7, 10, and 13 for other business lines);

Capital Group (home of American Funds) at rank 9;

Vanguard at rank 16; and

Allspring's Wells Fargo Advantage Funds at rank 26.

Anne Stanley, special reports editor at IBD, writes that "financial services firms have faced both internal and external challenges garnering the trust of their customers."

"Those that focus on the attributes in the 2023 IBD Most Trusted Financial Companies survey, especially financial soundness and quality products, should be recognized for their successes," Stanley writes.

To create the list (IBD's fourth, and its second in partnership with sister pub MarketWatch), the researchers first surveyed 507 consumers to rank the importance of 12 different trust attributes. From that, the researchers created a list of the seven most important areas of trust: financially sound/secure; quality of products/services; ethical business practices and values; privacy and security of personal data; customer service; prices, and sensitivity to customer needs in the current economic and financial climate (like issues around inflation and the stock market).

In phase two, the researchers then asked thousands of consumers to use those seven trust attributes to rate the financial services firms they do business with. From those ratings, the TechnoMetrica team calculated overall IBD Trust Index scores for different financial services firms. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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