In May this year, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) released the Action Plan for Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Public Fund Industry, marking a new stage of deeper reform and higher quality and efficiency for China’s public fund sector and providing clear direction for the industry’s high-quality development. Guided by the Action Plan, GF Fund Management stays focused on the core objectives of “safeguarding investors’ interests and serving the real economy,” practices an investor-centric business philosophy, strengthens professional capabilities, strives to enhance investors’ sense of gain, reinforces functional roles, and improves the effectiveness and quality of serving the real economy and national strategies.
Putting Investor Returns at the Center and Strengthening Professional Capabilities
The Action Plan makes it clear that the industry should adhere to an investor-centric approach and urges institutions to firmly establish a business philosophy with investors’ best interests at the core. GF Fund Management has written “delivering a high-quality profit experience” into its strategic positioning and drives improvement in investor returns across the full chain, from research and investment capabilities to product quality control and operational services.
Enhancing research and investment capabilities to better adapt to client needs and market conditions. Building on its diversified investment capabilities, GF Fund Management continues to promote investment strategy innovation and develop client-oriented equity solutions. Starting from investors’ needs, the company focuses on two directions to expand and scale its strategy set: first, strategies that can deliver all-weather, resilient returns and help investors navigate market cycles with more stable outcomes; second, strategies that provide clearly defined style-based allocation tools and offer investors more stable and reliable performance expectations. To this end, GF Fund Management has established dedicated teams for resilient strategies and all-weather investing to advance the development of low- to mid-volatility equity strategies. At the same time, through adjustments to existing products and new launches, the company has added strategies such as high dividend, smart beta, and global multi-asset approaches, aiming to provide investors with equity investment tools that offer higher transparency and stronger controllability.
Deepening benchmark-oriented product quality control to make performance more stable and manageable. In recent years, the company has continuously advanced product quality control management. Centered on improving client profitability experience and the quality of investment supply, it has built a closed-loop quality management system that both protects investors’ interests and leaves appropriate room for active management. First, it clarifies product positioning. Based on research on the liability side and the asset side, it strengthens three-way coordination among investment research, product, and distribution and marketing, and defines investment style and target client segments at the product creation stage. (Continued on Page A02)
(Continued from Page A01) It then calibrates key elements such as product positioning, contractual benchmark, and the fund manager’s investment style accordingly. Second, it strengthens process management. Through certain investment behavior constraints, it ensures that investment outcomes align with the product’s positioning, making performance more stable and controllable. The company has established an Investment Management Department and formed a professional team to optimize and execute investment rules. Anchored by product benchmarks, it provides fund managers with refined risk analysis and measurement to better support performance stability. Third, it establishes an appropriate performance evaluation and assessment mechanism. A correct incentive and assessment system is a key link in forming a closed management loop. While adhering to long-horizon evaluation, the company draws on quality inspection standards from industrial production, uses the benchmark as an important yardstick, enriches evaluation and assessment indicators, and strengthens accountability for both the investment committee and investment managers, continuously improving the professionalism of end-to-end product quality control through the assessment process.
Accelerating the transformation toward an advisory-oriented operating and service model to translate investment outcomes into client profitability experience. A core implication of the Action Plan is that investor returns should become an important standard for measuring value creation in the industry. This means fund companies must not only focus on improving product-level performance, but also pay greater attention to investors’ actual returns at the account level. To achieve this goal, GF Fund Management is actively promoting a shift in its operating and service model. In addition to building high-quality asset management products, it takes proactive steps in areas such as identifying client needs, matching solutions, and guiding investment behavior, helping investors address a series of issues including allocation, fund selection, and timing, and better completing the closed loop of profitability experience. First, it strengthens professional services in timing and product selection through teams such as asset allocation, account management, and index operations, delivering professional investment solutions. Second, it enhances client-segment-oriented deep client management by providing differentiated services and recommended product lists tailored to different segments, accurately capturing trend changes across client groups so that different types of clients can receive services that “understand what I need.” Third, leveraging data analytics and technology enablement, it launched the industry’s first conversational AI wealth assistant, “AiFa,” using AI and large-model technologies to track market developments and deliver personalized investment interpretation, providing investors with real-time, convenient, and intelligent wealth management services.
Responding to National Strategies and Policy Direction and Strengthening Functional Roles
The public fund industry connects the asset side and the liability side, offering unique advantages in optimizing the structure of capital supply and advancing the integration of industry and finance. The Action Plan’s reform measures encourage institutions to strengthen functional roles and enhance value creation capabilities, thereby better serving the real economy and national strategies. GF Fund Management states that fund companies should place their own development within the broader context of national strategic deployment and capital market reform and development. They should strengthen functional roles within the investment and financing cycle of emerging industries and patient capital, promote more efficient allocation of innovation resources, and ensure that development outcomes better benefit the broader public.
First, leveraging value discovery and asset pricing functions to support the growth of technology companies and emerging industries. The vigorous development of new quality productive forces and the increasing inclusiveness and coverage of the capital market create broad investment opportunities for fund companies, while also raising new capability requirements. Innovative technology companies commonly feature long profitability cycles, high growth potential, and high risk. Value discovery for such companies often requires research methods and valuation models different from those used in traditional industries, building new asset-pricing reference frameworks and accurately grasping inflection points of technological breakthroughs, feasibility of business models, and the certainty of long-term growth. GF Fund Management actively iterates its investment research framework, enhances its ability to identify and screen innovative technology enterprises, establishes dedicated organizational arrangements to strengthen in-depth research into frontier directions, expands talent reserves with technical and industrial backgrounds, and provides more precise and effective professional support for technological innovation and industrial innovation.
Second, fostering and scaling patient capital so that the achievements of new quality productive forces can better benefit the broader public. As a typical representative of inclusive finance and a bridge for various types of capital to enter the market, public funds should adhere to professional investment operations and high-quality returns to attract more social wealth into the market and convert it into long-term capital. They should help build a market environment in which medium- and long-term funds are willing to enter, able to stay, and able to grow well. Public funds should become a stable force supporting the capital market and the development of new quality productive forces, and also a reliable channel through which fund investors share the results of real-economy development and increase property income. On the one hand, the company will optimize the structure of product supply and improve a diversified product system that supports technological innovation. GF Fund Management has made “building a competitive matrix of technology innovation products” one of the main lines of product research and development and has formed a technology investment supply system that combines broad technology exposure with segmented fields, and coordinates active and passive approaches. In equities, it has created products such as STAR Market, ChiNext, Beijing Stock Exchange, and technology-themed funds; it continues to build a series of broad-based products with a higher concentration of new quality productive force characteristics, and further enriches positioning around emerging industries such as technology, semiconductors, and AI. In fixed income, it actively supports the development of a “technology board” in the bond market by being among the first to create a technology innovation bond ETF, supporting the capital market in strengthening equity-bond linkage to serve technological innovation. On the other hand, it strengthens expectation guidance, confidence building, and experience optimization for investors in new quality productive force-related areas. These areas offer long-term investment value, but also face near-term challenges such as rapid technological iteration and higher industry volatility. Since 2024, GF Fund Management has launched a themed series of “new quality productive forces” activities, holding on-site visits and industry salons across fields including intelligent IoT, the low-altitude economy, smart home, modern agriculture, and new energy vehicles. These activities help investors better understand frontier ecosystems and the intrinsic value of quality companies, reinforce long-term investment confidence, and guide social capital to flow steadily and persistently toward new quality productive forces.
Third, extending the business chain by exploring private equity and venture capital to better “invest early, invest in small, invest for the long term, and invest in hard technology.” The cultivation of new quality productive forces requires full-chain funding support. Hard-tech companies, in particular, often have long R&D cycles, large upfront investment, and uncertain profitability, which means secondary market investment alone cannot meet their life-cycle financing needs. Recently, GF Fund Management received approval to prepare for establishing an equity subsidiary. The company hopes to use this to go deeper into the primary market, play the role of patient capital at the seed and growth stages, better meet financing needs of technology companies across different stages of their life cycle, provide funding support for key technological breakthroughs, high-end manufacturing development, and strategic emerging industries, and help accelerate the transformation of scientific and technological achievements into real productivity.
Facing new circumstances and new requirements, GF Fund Management will deeply grasp the direction of capital market reform and development in the new era and the functional positioning of the public fund industry. It will firmly put investors’ interests at the core, steadily advance professional capability building, actively serve the development of new quality productive forces, better enable the results of economic development to benefit the people, and work with the industry to co-create a new ecosystem of value creation. Together, the industry will promote the high-quality development of the public fund sector and contribute professional strength toward the goal of building a strong financial nation.