What 4,200 Complaints Tell Us About Turkey's Increasingly Savvy Fund Investors

Şikayetvar, Turkey's consumer complaint platform, roughly analogous to a combination of Trustpilot and a public ombudsman filing, has become an unexpected barometer of how Turkey's fund industry is changing. Between January 2025 and January 2026, users filed 4,217 complaints against 38 different portfolio management companies registered on the platform. Fonkuşu scraped, categorised, and analysed every one of them. The taxonomy of grievances is remarkably consistent: 31% cite unexpected fee deductions from their fund balances. 22% describe frustration with redemption timing within the stated liquidity window. 18% report discrepancies between the performance figures shown in their brokerage app and the official TEFAS data for the same fund on the same date. And 14%, nearly 600 people, say they struggled to reach someone at the portfolio management company by phone, email, or any other channel. But what stands out is not the complaints themselves. It is the sophistication behind them. These are investors who know what TEFAS data says, who are comparing multiple sources, and who understand that a fee deduction should match a prospectus disclosure. A decade ago, most Turkish retail fund investors would not have known where to find a fund's official net asset value. Today, they are cross-referencing it against their brokerage app in real time.

The concentration of complaints offers further insight. Five firms account for 61% of all filings, and the leader, by a substantial margin, is a mid-size portfolio manager with fewer than 2 billion TL in AUM. The complaints against this firm follow a specific pattern: investors describe purchasing a fund through a bank distribution channel, seeing returns in their account that do not match TEFAS performance data, and then discovering upon attempted redemption that a performance fee, disclosed in the fund's prospectus but not in the marketing material they received from the bank, had been deducted at a rate of 15% of gains. This points to a gap not in regulation but in how information flows through the distribution chain. The fund's prospectus does technically disclose the performance fee. The bank's point-of-sale material does not always highlight it. This is the kind of friction that TEFAS's centralised data platform is designed to reduce, and there are signs of progress. Several portfolio management companies, responding to patterns visible in complaint data and TEFAS comparison tools, have improved their investor communications over the past year, adding fee breakdowns to monthly statements and creating dedicated investor-relations channels.

The broader picture that emerges from the Şikayetvar data is not one of an industry in crisis but of an industry undergoing a transition driven by its own customers. Rising complaint volumes, viewed in context, are a signal of an expanding and increasingly engaged investor base. Turkey's fund industry has grown from approximately 3 million individual investors in 2020 to over 8 million by the end of 2025, fuelled by TEFAS accessibility and a generation of digitally native savers seeking alternatives to bank deposits amid high inflation. As the investor base has grown, so have expectations. Investors are no longer passive recipients of whatever product the bank branch recommends. They compare fees on TEFAS, check performance on independent platforms, and hold firms publicly accountable when the experience does not match the promise. For portfolio managers, the message from Şikayetvar is clear: transparency is no longer optional, and the firms that invest in clear communication, accessible investor relations, and honest point-of-sale disclosure will be the ones that retain and grow their client base. The complaints are not a sign of failure. They are a sign that Turkey's fund investors are growing up, and they expect the industry to grow up with them.