Investment management firm Waverton attracted a net inflow of roughly £20mn a week into their financial adviser business segment in 2022.
Waverton is a discretionary investment manager that invests directly in the underlying securities, rather than in other funds.
It had total assets under management of £9.1bn to the end of 2022, of which £2.8bn came from financial advisers outsourcing to the company.
Total net inflows for the year were £1.4bn, an increase of 42 per cent on the previous year.
Those figures indicate that £1bn came from advisers and £400mn from the private client business.
Nick Tucker, chief executive at Waverton, told FTAdviser that the key to the growth in the adviser channel has been the firm’s increasing presence on platforms, with products now available on 25.
Tucker said: “We realise that if you want to deal with advisers you have to operate on their terms. You have to be on the platforms they use, not asking them to change something at their end.
"Our model portfolios have just passed their 10 year anniversary, there aren’t many that have been around as long as that. John Bellamy, who heads up our adviser solutions business, deserves the credit here. He was an early adopter in terms of realising that being on platforms and model portfolios was where it was heading.
"Investing directly means we can keep fees lower, and a lot of advisers use us as their active solution. But I think the biggest advantage to investing directly is that we can respond quickly to market events, certainly much more quickly than if we were buying other funds or passive products.”
He believes performance in the tumultuous year of 2020 has also contributed to the uptick in interest from advisers.
Tucker said: “At the start of 2020 our investment team were quite cautious, but by the end of the first quarter they were investing with growth in mind, and of course that proved to be the right decision.
"When we launched we told people we would just keep up with markets when bull markets were happening, but that we would show our value when volatility was high, and we have done that in recent years, so clients have noticed.”
Tucker said the firm can now feel like “an established player” in the model portfolio market, and as a consequence he has started to explore ways in which this new scale can be exploited.
He said: “It’s the aim of every business to achieve the right level of scale. We have a five year plan we are working towards, and I am glad to say we are ahead of that plan now.
"One thing we have done in the past year is outsource our back office functions. Now that won’t save us money this year, but what it does is give us a variable cost base over the longer-term - we can reduce or increase it flexibly. We have also added some staff to the support function, that is the team that work with the client facing staff.”
Those inflow and assets under management figures translated into a profit of £54.9mn in 2022, up from £50mn in the prior year.
The next stage of growth for the company, according to Tucker, is to launch a range of multi-asset funds, which will be brought to market later this year.
Tucker said the rationale for launching this product range is simply that “it’s what our clients are asking for".
"We have recently hired someone to work within the multi-asset team as part of that.”
david.thorpe@ft.com
