For wealth managers, differentiating yourself from your peers is not always easy.
Sure, you can bang the drum for capital preservation, your risk-rated model portfolios and long-term investment horizon, but these are all now common across the industry.
For investment director Alan Beaney and head of managed funds Glenn Meyer, the distinguishing feature of Bristol-based RC Brown is its institutional pedigree.
“We have long served institutional investors, so the basic philosophy behind what we do is to bring institutional portfolio construction management disciplines to the small and medium-sized private client arena,” says Meyer.
“We do have some very wealthy clients but we are not looking at a family office-type structure – we are not ultra-high net-worth. The portfolio construction disciplines we have mean we are trying to protect clients’ capital through diversification.”
Taking chances
All well and good, but to get to the nitty gritty of what differentiates RC Brown from its peers, says Meyer, is that a traditional UK wealth manager is usually “much more opportunistic in approach”, with portfolios constructed of fewer stocks but a rather greater concentration of risk than you might expect.
“If a wealth manager can, more often than not, be buying something that is coming into favour and managing to get out at the right time, then if you are their client you are going to do incredibly well,” he adds.
“I don’t think I can consistently do that, so we would rather look to protect capital. We define risk as being the chance of suffering a permanent loss of capital, an old-fashioned definition, but we are focused on assessing how the market will react to something that is about to happen, rather than what has happened.”
Better together
RC Brown Investment Management was set up in 1990, under ongoing chairman Bob Brown, serving company pension schemes and major charities.
It was in 2009 that the IFA-focused private client business was formed with Beaney’s recruitment from Principal Investment Management.
Meyer joined a year later from Standard & Poor’s’ fund research arm. Both have a history of working together at Lloyds Investment Managers. The business currently has £85m under management, in addition to a further £120m run on behalf of third-party fund managers.
Asset allocation is split across five models – cautious, cautious balanced, balanced, balanced growth and growth.
