The debate over the cost of poor performance by bank-owned retail funds versus industry super funds has been further advanced. This time, it wasn't in front of the banking royal commission, but at the hands of the A$111 billion institutional fund manager, IFM Investors, which is to return some of its fees to investors after an "exceptional" year."We want to send a very clear message to our investors, and indeed, our competitors, we are determined to set world-class standards that genuinely put investors first," said IFM Investors chief executive Brett Himbury.IFM, which attracts funds from institutional investors in 19 countries, has promised a rebate equivalent to 7.5 per cent of the annual net recurring investment management fees it collects from those fund managers. Himbury said that 89 per cent of products and mandates across four asset classes - infrastructure, debt, listed equities and private equity - were meeting or outperforming client objectives on a rolling five-year basis, after fees and taxes.All 27 of IFM's investors are industry funds or pension funds in Australia, North America and Europe, allowing a sharp focus on delivering superior net returns to industry super fund members' accounts to continue.Meanwhile, keeping the focus squarely on unfair fees and costs, in the wake of the latest round of hearing in banking royal commission, is a report prepared by a group of researchers at Melbourne's RMIT UniversityThis paper, publish in July 2018, calculated the gap between industry funds and the for-profit models, starting with the largest segment of the superannuation market, default and balanced options. Stripping out fees and taxes over five years (ie, taking into account the amounts credited to members), the gap came to about 1.84 per cent. This extrapolated to a direct cost to members of those for-profit funds of about A$6.9 billion annually. The RMIT thesis, however, is that the difference is not just about fees or poor governance.The writers suggested, instead, that these were symptoms of the "structural or institutionally embedded conflicts of duty and interest" that have led to the overcharging and underperformance that has allowed 'for-profit' funds - which control 30 per cent of all funds invested - to rack up 50 per cent of the industry's total fees and costs.This, the paper said, implied for-profits demolished $12 billion of their members' savings annually.If so, the costs of the problems "embedded" in for?profit wealth management are much larger than those in the banking sector (through the government's implicit lender of last resort guarantee).They are also more entrenched, with the RMIT academics suggesting that the "naive and weak regulatory enforcement" by APRA and ASIC (which saw them aiming to mitigate rather than prevent or prohibit conflicts of duty and interest) "amounts to a historic failure of regulation."The interim report from Commissioner Kenneth Hayne is due at the end of this month.