He held up a sheaf of documents that had accumulated around his feet, which he identified as account reports, ledger statements and message slips.
There were so many more important things to worry about that day. But now, as America prepares to start its recovery, you might be mildly concerned about your investment records.
Rest assured: Everything should still be there. While this wasn’t the disaster the fund industry was expecting, preparation for catastrophe has long been a big, unseen part of the fund business.
“Fire, flood, earthquake or anything that could jeopardize the safety of mutual fund documents was dealt with long before this incident,” says Michelle A. Smith, managing director of the Mutual Fund Education Alliance.
But that doesn’t mean that investors won’t worry.
Take the case of the Oppenheimer funds, for example, whose offices were housed in 2 World Trade Center, the first building attacked last Tuesday.
Oppenheimer services shareholder accounts in Denver, so the fact that the headquarters office was a total loss had no impact on shareholders.
(Oppenheimer reported last week that all of its headquarters employees were accounted for and safe.)
The system in Denver has backups, too. If something happened in Colorado, from a blizzard knocking out power to much worse, Oppenheimer’s operations would be switched to a different facility and investors most likely would not notice any disruption in service.
Most fund companies hire out their back-room and accounting functions.
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The firms that do this kind of servicing, as well as the fund giants that handle it on their own, tend to have multiple stations. In the event of a problem in one part of the country, everything gets switched over from one center to the next, so that operations keep running and no data is lost.
“Investors in mutual funds might worry about a lot of things,” says Steven Wynne, executive vice president of PFPC Inc., one of the largest firms handling the fund industry’s back-room operations. “Having your account disappear on account of some disaster isn’t one of them.”
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Chuck Jaffe is mutual funds columnist at The Boston Globe. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] or at The Boston Globe, Box 2378, Boston, Mass. 02107-2378.