Adviser workshop: How to use another IFA’s investment proposition

Matthew Walne (pictured), Neil Hewitt and Michael Broom on outsourcing to another IFA’s investment proposition.

Matthew Walne

Director, Santorini Financial Planning

A year ago we started outsourcing our investment to Craig Burgess, managing director of Blackstone Wealth Management, whose outsourcing company is called Evidence Based Investment.

Before that I was doing a bit of the investment myself but I was mainly outsourcing to discretionary fund managers (DFMs,) such as Seven Investment Management (7IM) and Quilter.

I currently have £1 million in assets and eight clients using Craig’s portfolios. I don’t do any investment myself and, although I have a few clients with DFMs, I don’t put any new clients with them and mainly put the new business into Craig’s portfolios.

There are 20 model portfolios that use passive funds and they range from 15% equities to 100% going up in blocks of 5%.

Evidence Based Investment provides all the information and it doesn’t need changing or altering. It’s almost like a DFM service in that way.

Creating model portfolios

I take the information and copy it, to physically build the model portfolios on a wrap platform. We then brand the portfolios as our own so it is like a white-labelled service and the clients see the portfolios as part of our service.

It makes my life so much easier because I don’t have to look at funds every month. It’s a huge time saver and all my clients like it because it closely matches their attitude to risk rather than having three or four portfolios which they may only just fit into.

The cost is a major issue with DFMs as they are quite expensive, so if they’re charging 1% per annum plus VAT with adviser charging on top it soon mounts up.