Once the immediate pressures had been managed through hard and soft closures those fund providers who had been required to take these measures, and some others who hadn’t, began to take a slightly more strategic look at how they were going to handle what it was rapidly becoming clear was going to be a much more sustained low interest rate environment than everybody had hoped. In some cases this involved introducing new funds, not the typical AAA-rated CNAV funds, but the relatively unknown VNAV funds. In other cases more creative solutions were introduced such as what has now become almost the standard alternative to converting to VNAV, the ‘flexible distributing’ share class, a neat way to allow the CNAV status of a fund to be protected whilst avoiding the potentially damaging effects of negative yields on both investors and fund managers.