A Practical Handbook for Fund Professionals Based on FundsXML Schema Version 4.2.x · 2026
Part of the FundsXML standard — the open, royalty-free European fund data standard.
The complete handbook is published free of charge at the address above. No account, download, or technical setup is required — just open the link in your browser.
FundsXML is the open European standard for exchanging fund data — master data, prices, portfolios, transactions, and regulatory reporting — between asset managers, custodians, distributors, data vendors, and regulators.
This handbook explains the standard in plain, practical terms for fund professionals: product, operations, data, reporting, and project people who need to understand what FundsXML covers, why the industry relies on it, and how it is used day to day. The early chapters are deliberately non-technical; later chapters go deeper for those who need the detail.
A single fictional fund — the Europa Growth Fund, a Luxembourg-domiciled UCITS distributed across Europe — runs through every chapter as a continuous, realistic example.
From the landing page you can choose whichever format suits you:
- Read the whole book online as one continuous page — ideal for searching and scrolling end to end.
- Download the PDF — for offline reading, printing, or circulating internally.
- Read chapter by chapter — each chapter is its own page with previous / next / contents navigation, so you can dip in where it is relevant to you. Page numbers in the table of contents refer to the complete book, so it is easy to gauge length and find your place.
A light/dark reading mode is available on every page.
The book runs to roughly 515 pages, organised in four parts plus appendices:
- Part I — Foundations: why the industry needs a standard, and the basics behind it.
- Part II — FundsXML in Detail: the building blocks of a delivery — control data, funds and share classes, portfolios, transactions, and regulatory modules (EMT, EPT, EET, EFT, TPT).
- Part III — Implementation and Practice: validation and quality, tooling, fitting FundsXML into your system landscape, and running an implementation project end to end.
- Part IV — Outlook and Reference: where the standard is heading, plus a glossary, quick references, a schema overview, complete worked examples, and an index.
You do not need to read it cover to cover — the management summary at the front is a two-minute orientation, and the table of contents lets you jump straight to what matters to you.
This book is published openly so the fund-data community can read it freely and help improve it. Corrections, clarifications, and suggestions are very welcome — please see CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get in touch or propose a change.
- Book text: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) — see LICENSE.
- Accompanying code examples: MIT — see LICENSE-CODE.
When reusing the text, please attribute it as “FundsXML — The European Standard for Fund Data Exchange” with a link back to this repository.