Good morning and welcome to your Morning Briefing for Friday 3 May 2024. To get this in your inbox every morning click here.
How advice can rebuild its sense of community
It was not that long ago financial advice was deemed a ‘cottage industry’ on the basis that, among other things, over 90% of firms had five advisers or less.
This classification has aged in more recent times with trends such as consolidation. However, the industry is still comprised of mostly small businesses and, within this segment, a significant percentage are single adviser firms.
Quilter hires Simon Durling as investment director
Wealth manager Quilter has announced the appointment of Simon Durling as investment director.
Durling will be responsible for promoting Quilter’s full range of investment propositions, such as the WealthSelect Managed Portfolio Service and the Cirilium portfolio range, to advisers and external audiences.
Benefits Guru announces financial wellness ratings
Benefits Guru has announced its fourth annual Financial Wellness Ratings benchmarking Workplace Pension providers.
The ratings look at providers that deliver Open Finance technology in recognition of the growing opportunity and importance of financial insight and improved member outcomes.
Among the six providers rated at present, Scottish Widows has improved from a Silver award in 2023 to a Gold award this year, as its new partnership with Moneyhub has had such a positive impact on the overall positions.
Quote Of The Day
My view continues to be that the end of the bonus cap will not lead to an 80s style investment banking pay bonanza.
– Adrian Crawford, employment partner at Kingsley Napley, comments on news that Goldman Sachs is abandoning the bonus cap for top-performing staff
Stat Attack
Equity funds saw modest inflows in March, according to latest industry data from the Investment Association.
£446m
Retail investors put a net £446 million into funds, but that follows withdrawals of £3.8 billion across January and February. Fund managers will hope this is the start of a recovery, but it could simply be increased activity at the end of the tax year.
£3.4bn
The big drag on fund flows came from UK equity funds, which saw £3.4 billion of outflows in the first three months of the year. Active funds also continue to lose money to passive funds.
£6.6bn
Tracker funds saw £6.6 billion of retail inflows in the first quarter, while active funds saw £10 billion of outflows.
£4bn
The government is hoping to reinvigorate investment into UK equities with the launch of the UK ISA, The hope is that the UK ISA will create an additional £4bn of inflows into UK equities every year, but UK equity funds are seeing withdrawals of that order every quarter.
£725m
ESG funds saw outflows of £725m in the first quarter. These may struggle to once again hit the heights of the pandemic period, when strong performance and numerous fund launches created a swell of demand.
Source: AJ Bell/Investment Association
In Other News
Janus Henderson Group plc has agreed terms under which it will acquire European ETF provider Tabula Investment Management.
The acquisition builds on Janus Henderson’s successful active fixed income ETF proposition in the US, where it is the fourth largest provider of active fixed income ETFs by assets under management.
The company expects partnering with Tabula will enable Janus Henderson to respond to client’s demand globally for its investment strategies to include a UCITS ETF wrapper, which is the most ubiquitous ETF structure outside of the US.
The European ETF market is undergoing a significant transformation, growing considerably and mirroring trends observed in the US market where active management is increasingly being incorporated into the ETF wrapper.
Nearly 10% of European ETF launches last year were actively managed, with assets in European-listed actively managed ETFs experiencing a growth of almost 50% during the same period.
Janus Henderson Group is a leading global active asset manager, which as of December 31 2023 had US$335 billion in assets under management, more than 2,000 employees and offices in 24 cities worldwide.
The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA)’s director of policy and advocacy, Nigel Peaple, is stepping away from his current role to work on a part-time basis as the PLSA’s Chief Policy Counsel.
After eight years at the PLSA, Peaple has decided to step back from full-time work and to instead switch to working on a part-time basis. He was also director of policy for five years in the late noughties at the PLSA’s predecessor body, the NAPF.
His role as director policy and advocacy, which includes being a member of the PLSA Board, will finish at the end of August.
Peaple will take up a new part-time role as the PLSA’s first chief policy counsel. In this role he will provide policy advice to the chief executive, to the chairs of the Policy Board and Policy Committees, and to the in-coming director of policy and advocacy.
He will also undertake an advocacy role on the PLSA’s key priority projects in this pivotal general election year.
Investors flood into Taiwan ETFs on AI boom, unnerving some (Reuters)
Apple’s revenue falls less than feared despite rocky start to the year (Financial Times)
HSBC asked by $890bn investor group to set new energy goal (Bloomberg)
Did You See?
“Market sentiment has swung from pessimism early last year to increasingly expecting a Goldilocks outcome this year, where inflation and interest rates gradually fall and growth remains strong,” write Chris Forgan and Caroline Shaw, portfolio managers of the Fidelity Multi Asset Open range.
“The change in mood has been driven by improving macroeconomic data. But as is often the case during periods of optimism (or pessimism for that matter), investors appear to have adopted a binary view of the macro landscape.”
Read the full article here.