abrdn: How the MyFolio Lookthrough tool benefits advisers and their clients

Author, Dave Fewtrell, Head of Strategic Partnerships, UK Wholesale

Designed to deliver consistent, compliant investment solutions for clients, centralised investment propositions (CIPs) are the cornerstones of many financial advisory businesses.

Whether it’s developed inhouse or outsourced, a CIP sets out a firm’s investment options for each of its client segments and aims to generate positive outcomes for customers with different risk appetites, investment objectives, and time horizons.

CIP investment strategies

Advice firms typically use multiple combinations of different investment strategies within a CIP, usually dependent on client segments, their needs and objectives. A recent survey shows that nearly half¹ of advisers use multi-asset and/or multi-manager funds to some degree. In our view, there are a number of benefits of using these funds:

• A straightforward way to diversify investments, with access to a variety of global assets such as equities and bonds in a single solution
• Widely available across UK platforms, they can be re-registered platform-to-platform
• Multi-asset fund managers can receive rebates on underlying funds, further lowering portfolio costs
• Minimal time out of the market when fund switching due to the ability to pre-fund within the portfolio
• Typically rebalanced daily back to risk tolerance
• Portfolio execution risk is managed centrally within the fund by the manager so there’s no portfolio drift between platforms
• Multi-asset and multi-manager funds can invest in a broad range of assets including investment trusts and less-liquid/non-daily dealing funds/exchange-traded funds (ETFs)
• Reduced impact of stranded assets, for example, a gated direct property fund does not necessarily prevent rebalancing
• Easier to manage capital gains tax (CGT) for clients (due to continuous risk profile rebalancing within the fund structure)

What about portfolio lookthrough?

Despite these benefits, one question laid at the door of multi asset funds, is the so-called ‘single line of stock issue’. A multi-asset fund is a single fund entity and therefore ‘optically’ is deemed to be less sophisticated than alternative portfolio solutions.

To overcome this perceived issue and deliver a multitude of benefits, saving advisers precious time and providing them with valuable insights, abrdn Investments offers the MyFolio Lookthrough Tool. The tool enables you to access the latest MyFolio fund performance, updates and commentary quickly and easily.

Benefits of the MyFolio Lookthrough tool

• Provides a full lookthrough to all of the underlying holdings within each MyFolio portfolio
• Offers an interactive way of x-raying the entire MyFolio fund range
• Provides key facts on all of the MyFolio funds, performance data, the latest strategic asset allocation, tactical asset allocation, market and fund commentary
• Advisers and paraplanners can use the tool as part of CIP research, or for client review reporting
• Delivers access to timely reports, bulletins and factsheets, updated monthly
• Advisers can use the content as input to investment committee meetings
• A quick and easy source of client-friendly reports to stimulate discussion topics in review meetings
• Open access – so doesn’t require logins, or data sharing

More about MyFolio - a cost-effective outsourced investment solution

The MyFolio fund range of risk-targeted multi-asset funds is designed to align with your financial planning processes.

Select the most appropriate outcome for your client and leave the management of the investments to us.

For more information on the MyFolio fund range, click here, or contact your usual abrdn Investments business development manager.

1. Platforum UK Financial Advisers: Investment Propositions, June 2024

Risk warning

The value of investments, and the income from them, can go down as well as up and an investor may get back less than the amount invested.