Will the Transparency Label Initiative’s labels make a difference?  Yes.

Spurred on by its regulators, a large, $200 billion in assets Dutch pension firm, PGGM, is providing an example.  It is in the process of demonstrating that investors don’t have to blindly gamble where the label is not present and can instead refuse to invest until they are provided with all the information they need to make an informed decision.

In doing so, PGGM is taking on one of the most opaque sectors of the global financial system: private equity investments.

Yves Smith discusses on NakedCapitalism how

In the Netherlands, the Federation of Dutch Pension Funds introduced new reporting standards in 2012 requiring Dutch pension funds to show full investment costs. These standards have been adopted by the Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), with the expectation that all Dutch pension funds will comply with their 2014 financial statements. Specifically for PE, full investment costs include full management fees, performance fees, consulting fees, monitoring fees and transaction costs.

PGGM isn’t simply responding to these new requirements. It’s putting the entire private equity fee-gouging regime in its crosshairs, and demanding that fees bear a reasonable relationship to costs.

Private equity firms face a choice: either disclose or lose investors like PGGM.