Okay. Effectively, an investor in a fund product pays two levels of expenses: management fees and operating expenses. Typically, though it's changing a bit these days, the operating expenses the fund manager will charge are costed back to the fund.
You've heard the expression “management expense ratio”. Let's say your management expense ratio was 2.14%; then 2% is usually the management fee, and the 0.14% are these operating expenses. We try very hard to lower that 0.14 on a regular basis.
The idea in a merger.... Let's say we had started a fund. It might be performing well, but for whatever reason, investors haven't been interested in it. Because there are a lot of fixed costs to running a fund, if you have a small investor base, you can't really disburse them across a wide number of investors, so the expense ratio tends to go up.
Very often you'll see mergers being proposed even on successful funds when the expense ratio is not high, because it's not really a good deal for investors anymore. They might still be making money, but it's very inefficient because of all those expenses, so you might want to merge two mandates to try to pool the cost and lower those expenses and deal with it that way. It's typically about efficiency.