Credit Suisse commentator Sean Keane cast a spotlight on the latest money market fund report from the Investment Company Institute.Keane wrote last night that, of US$55.6 billion in money market fund outflows over the past three weeks, the majority of the losses have come from the prime funds, "and particularly from the institutional sector which is dominated by large cash managers who have traditionally bought shorter dated bank issued commercial paper." The demand for this paper has been steadily diminishing as the assets held in the various institutional prime funds have continued to fall, Keane said."Volumes held in these funds stood close to US$1.3 trillion in March 2008. By 2015 that number had declined to $US940 billion and today the number is just over US$800 billion," he said.The number of active funds offering prime investments to large institutions has almost halved over the past eight years, and now stands at 244 versus a peak level of 439 funds in 2008. It is very likely that these numbers will fall further over the next 6 months. Government only funds have of course been beneficiaries of these prime fund outflows, Keane said.Funds under management in this sector have grown by 30 per cent over the past 12 months and now stand at $1.3 trillion, the level of prime funds before the great recession. The ability of banks, including major Australian names, to "raise funding via this mechanism is now much reduced with institutional prime funds now managing more than half a trillion dollars less today than they were in 2008. "It's certainly the case that the commercial banks have all changed their funding profiles since the GFC, and thus there is less demand and less reliance on such short end funding. That is undoubtedly a very good thing. The size of the contraction however still leaves a meaningful funding gap for many banks, and especially for non-US based borrowers," Keane concluded.