On 3 July, Credit Suisse announced the launch of sixteen new XMTCH ETFs, as part of a major expansion of its exchange-traded fund range. The launch takes the total number of XMTCH ETFs from eight to 24.

Seven of the new funds are equity ETFs, based upon different MSCI country indices. The other nine ETFs track fixed income indices, eight of which are iBoxx indices on US and European government debt, and the ninth of which is a Swiss bond index. Two of the iBoxx-based ETFs are inflation-linked.

All but one of the funds are part of a new, Irish-domiciled fund range. The Irish funds are all compliant with UCITS III regulations, making them available to investors across the European Union. Up to now Credit Suisse’s XMTCH ETFs were domiciled either in Switzerland or Luxembourg.

According to the latest edition of the Deutsche Bank ETF Liquidity Trends publication, XMTCH ranks fifth amongst European ETF issuers by assets under management, with €4.4 billion invested. Over half of this is invested in a single fund, the benchmark Swiss equity ETF, XMTCH on SMI.

The Swiss bank is going against the recent trend for ETF launches to be based on swap-based replication. All the new funds use either full replication or optimised sampling as their means of tracking the underlying index.

Initial listings are in Switzerland and Ireland, and with Credit Suisse as market maker either solely, or jointly with Unicredit.

A full list of the new ETFs is given in the table below.

Where competing funds exist, the new XMTCH ETFs have generally been launched at a lower annual charge. For example, the 0.12% annual charge on six of the iBoxx ETFs is the lowest fee on any European government bond tracker, as is the 0.16% fee on the inflation-linked ETFs. The fees on the MCSI USA Large Cap and MSCI USA Small Cap ETFs, at 0.22% and 0.30%, undercut Comstage’s equivalent funds, whose charges are 0.25% and 0.35%, respectively. Only the MSCI EMU Small Cap fund, with a fee of 0.42%, carries a higher charge than a competitor fund, that of Lyxor, which is set at 0.40%.