The spotlight is on fees once again

At the start of the two-day AsianInvestor fourth annual investment summit in Hong Kong yesterday, Peter Ryan-Kane, head of portfolio advisory for Asia-Pacific at Watson Wyatt, made the point that to simply say that fees are too high is naive. He and the other panellists at the conference agreed that there are many parties and factors involved in determining fees -- the fund managers, the service providers, the regulators, the clients -- and finding the right balance can be tricky.