Discretionary funds under management totalled £2.97bn in the first half of the year, an increase of 6 per cent on the first quarter of 2011 and up by 36 per cent compared to the first half of 2010.
Chris Macdonald, chief executive of Brooks Macdonald, said: “This has been another period of strong growth in funds under management. We continue to benefit from the support of our existing professional connections as well as a steady growth in new relationships as more firms seek investment outsourcing solutions.
“We have continued to recruit intermediary sales managers and investment managers and have the resources in place to support our ambitious growth strategy.”
Matthew Rich, independent financial planner for Avon-based Alan Seward Financial Services, said IFAs were increasingly moving away from picking their own funds and opting to outsource investment management.
He said: “It is almost a full-time job to manage money so advisers are now concentrating on risk-profiling their clients and bringing in the right experts to manage money. Because of treating customers fairly, it is now more about building a proposition that is robust in terms of compliance and it makes more sense to outsource to a discretionary fund manager such as Brooks Macdonald.
“We stopped picking individual funds for clients five years ago. Now we put clients with a discretionary fund manager or a managed portfolio service.”
Mr Rich added that his firm has received marketing information from a huge number of companies who have launched new discretionary fund manager services or model portfolio services.
He said: “Everyone has realised this is the way the industry is going. There are dozens of them out there.”
Source:http://www.ftadviser.com/FinancialAdviser/Investments/News/article/20110728/2667ecbe-b381-11e0-a6c3-00144f2af8e8/Brooks-Macdonald-reaps-benefits-of-outsourcing.jsp
