It already offers a bespoke discretionary portfolio management service to ultra HNW individuals with a minimum of £2.5m in investable assets. The new proposition will be available to intermediary clients with a minimum of £25k to invest.
Bryan Parkinson, a director at Barclays, and head of the firm’s UK IFA distribution, commented: “The proposition aims to provide intermediaries with an outsourced investment solution which enables them to continue to own the client relationship whilst drawing on the wealth management and investment expertise of the UK’s largest wealth manager through a range of professionally managed investment portfolios.”
What makes this different to most other propositions, he added, is that the five portfolios are actively managed across active and passive investments; they invest across nine asset classes including commodities, property and hedge funds; they are able to call on 200 people who feed into the portfolios’ asset allocation; they are risk-led rather than investment led, with input from the firm’s behavioural finance team.
Parkinson also made mention of their costs which are competitive, he said, with multi-managers and other multi-asset portfolios. Barclays charges 40 basis points, added to which there is a 25 bp charge from Ascentric, the platform through which the propositions will initially be exclusively made available.
There are plans to expand the offering through other platforms in the coming months.
Described as a “turnkey offering”, the five profiles have different levels of volatility – from between 1% and 5% to between 11% and 15% – that intermediaries can match to their clients’ specific risk and profile requirements. At one extreme, the emphasis for investment portfolio five is developed market equities (51%) and emerging market equities (17%) with 16% across the bond asset classes and a further 16% in commodities, real estate and alternatives.
At the other, investment portfolio one has just 16% in developed market equities and only 4$ in emerging market equities. Instead, it has 43% in short maturity bonds, 11% in alternatives and 10% in developed government bonds.
“We have been doing discretionary portfolio management for a while, offering more tailored solutions to high net worth individuals,” Parkinson said. “This is proper discretionary advice for affluent investors.”
