I work as an independent compliance consultant working mainly with IFA firms around London and the South-East. I have several firms for whom I undertake different duties. I have previously undertaken platform research and distributed it among my client firms.
One of the firms asked me to undertake research on MPS as they had been running their own portfolios and were looking to move to a third-party arrangement.
I looked around the market for reports and found Defaqto, the Langcat and Next Wealth reports. The first two were commissioned by OMW WealthSelect and unsurprisingly focussed on that. When I looked at the reports, they had a core of MPS providers but they each had some that did not appear on the other reports. I went onto FE Analytics where I found a lot more. But none of them had as much detail as I wanted or breadth of providers. So, I thought that I would just have to do it myself.
This research is to show the Managed Portfolio Services that are currently available for Independent Financial Advisers to use for their clients’ investment strategies.
There are many providers in the market offering Managed (Model) Portfolio Services (MPS). It is an extremely competitive market. Many Discretionary Fund Managers (DFM) offer managed portfolios for investors who want their money managed professionally, but do not have the size of investment that would warrant the expense of a bespoke discretionary fund management service, which is used for High Net Worth (HNW) investors.. Rather than miss out on the Mass Affluent (MA) market of people who want to invest, but not the same magnitude, the Managed Portfolio Services have been introduced.
I am looking to provide information on a wider range of providers to show how any Managed Portfolio Service chosen by a firm is competitive in the market and why it may be chosen to suit the clients of the advising firm. If there are errors in this report, please advise me and I will correct them.
The more I looked into the MPS, the more I realised that there are a lot of very good practitioners in the field. All apparently with their own views on investment and how much better they were than their competitors.
This report can only be considered to be a snapshot of the market in July 2020. Whilst I have a wider range of providers than any other report that I have seen on MPS providers, there are still a lot of providers that are not in this report, simply due to the numbers available. If there are any providers that you would like included in future editions of this report, please advise me.
It just proves that there is an investment strategy to suit every investor. They just need to be discovered and identified.
With all these managed portfolio services providers available, it is a mystery why any financial planning firm would want to devote so much of their valuable time running their own portfolios.
Tony Catt
Tony Catt Compliance Consultant
TC Compliance Services
Mobile: 07899 847338
Email: info@tonycatt.co.uk
