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In the UK, your average financial adviser would appear to have little interest in offshore funds.

True, nine out of every 10 IFAs do use offshore funds - domiciled in, say, Dublin or Luxembourg - but those funds account for only a 10th of clients’ overall portfolios, according to a study by HSBC Investments. The lion’s share of offshore demand comes from the likes of discretionary managers and multi-managers. Your core, run-of-the-mill financial intermediary, for the most part, could not care less.

For many asset managers, this poses something of a problem. An investment house like Allianz Global Investors, for example, might wish to bring an especially well-performing, Luxembourg-domiciled Sicav to UK retail investors, but before it can generate any genuine interest among IFAs, the company must first launch an onshore version of it.

Needless to say, having to launch an onshore version of every Sicav a company wants to market will do nothing to reverse the trend of fund proliferation in Europe, where more than 30,000 funds are now registered, according to Lipper Feri. More than that, the practice is terribly inefficient for any company that wants to distribute a fund in more than one country.

It should come as little surprise, then, that companies like Allianz Global Investors, among others, are now making a concerted effort to raise the profile of offshore funds among IFAs in the UK. One of the chief methods of doing this, they believe, will be to convince the likes of Fidelity FundsNetwork and Cofunds to increase the number of offshore funds on their platforms, thereby giving the products greater visibility and financial advisers easier access.

But that might be easier said than done. While FundsNetwork and Cofunds currently do include a handful of offshore funds on their platforms, both have said they see little reason to ramp up the offshore presence.

According to Richard Eats, communications consultant at Cofunds, the main criteria for whether an offshore fund is included on the platform is sufficient IFA demand.

“To be honest, we haven’t been overwhelmed,” he says. “It’s very much in our interest to put on whatever advisers want to buy, but we don’t want to put on anything in which nobody really has any interest. That just clogs up the system. Like any business, we like demand.”

Rob Fisher, head of UK retail marketing at Fidelity International, largely agrees.

"We have a small range of Sicavs on the core FundsNetwork platform - essentially funds from Fidelity and Schroders,” he says. “While we add new funds and providers to the platform on a regular basis, demand for Sicavs from our users remains subdued."

Unfortunately for companies like Allianz Global Investors, there is an element of the old “chicken-egg” conundrum here. As long as there is relatively little demand for offshore funds, platforms will be unlikely to add them. And yet, if platforms do not add them, what chance does your average IFA have of finding out about them?

Perhaps the most effective thing an asset management group can do, then, is to convince the IMA to include offshore funds within its sector classifications and, more importantly, its performance tables.

According to Mark Dampier, head of research at Bristol-based IFA Hargreaves Lansdown, if an investment house wants one of its offshore funds to get noticed, the best thing it can do is try and get the fund included in an IMA sector. When financial journalists write about the best-performing funds over a given period, he says, they tend to use domestic IMA statistics - so offshore funds are often altogether ignored.

“I remember the Gartmore China fund, going about four years back, appeared in the rankings as the best-performing fund at the time, and within a few weeks, we were seeing really big inflows,” he said. “The better performing fund over the period was actually a Barings offshore fund, but it didn’t get anything because no one knew about it.”

For its part, the IMA says it is now looking into the possibility of including offshore funds into its sectors and that a closed-door working group is currently consulting with a number of investment houses on the matter.