Better communication and hiring an investment team to talk directly with advisers is central to Edward Park’s plans to grow the investment management business at Evelyn Partners.
Park joined Evelyn Partners as chief investment officer from Brooks Macdonald, where he held the same role.
He is responsible for around £10bn of assets across the model portfolios, discretionary portfolios and fund ranges - all of those being products available to financial advisers.
Park said: “In the adviser segment, the aim is to improve communication, to make life easier for the adviser. We want to bring the portfolios we construct for them and their clients to life.”
One way he is considering doing this is through the creation of a team of investment specialists, which would be new roles within the company but is something he did at Brooks Macdonald.
Park said: “Right now the contact point for an adviser using our service is the business development manager in their region, and depending on the complexity of the query, they may then speak with the investment manager.
"Advisers right now get a bespoke response to any query but the response is from the business development manager.
"The aim with the new investment specialist roles would be to provide the adviser with access to someone who knows the portfolios, investments, and knows the team that help set the asset allocation.”
Evelyn Partners range includes model portfolios, bespoke and fund of funds, and in many cases blends active and passive funds.
Park said advisers are “increasingly navigating towards products that blend active and passive".
"We think of it as, advisers have a fee budget to spend when constructing a portfolio, and for some asset classes, such as emerging market equities, it makes sense to spend some of that fee budget on active managers.
"Whereas for an asset class such as US equities, they don’t want to spend much of the fee budget they have on an active manager as that asset class is notoriously hard to beat the index."
Park said one of the challenges faced by all wealth management firms right now is that deposit accounts are paying up to 5 per cent interest, and he said “understandably clients find that an attractive option".
But he added that part of his role is to “help clients understand".
"If we are in a world where interest rates have peaked, then the current level of cash rates will be cut. The thing about bonds is that right now you can get the same sort of yield as on cash, but they can be locked in for longer.”
Park believes that 70 to 80 per cent of the returns achieved through an investment portfolio come from asset allocation, with the remainder from fund selection.
The total assets under management of Evelyn Partners is £61.8bn.
david.thorpe@ft.com
