This client had invested in offshore "personlised" portfolio offshore in order to ensure a high degree of flexibility and tax efficiency. He had appointed a wealth manager to control the portfolio as he did not have the time, inclination or experience to manage it himself.
After sometime the client became concerned that the portfolio was not performing as well as he hoped. The client wanted to discuss the situation with the portfolio manager as he was aware that the markets had been on a “bear run” for a while, but he had a number of questions to ask:
- How was each fund in his portfolio performing?
- What changes had he made, if any, to the portfolio?
- Had the manager changed his investment strategy recently?
- Was he going to change any of the funds to protect the capital?
- Had the long bear run of the markets made him re-think his asset allocation?
- What was his long term view of the markets?
- Was there any other investments asset he was exploring?
Unfortunately it was here that the client hit something of a brick wall. Firstly he could not get to speak to the portfolio manager, he was always unavailable, busy or not there. The customer service team he spoke to could not offer any investment advice and simply sent him a fact sheet on his portfolio. This did not offer any explanation and simply gave the performance figurers for each fund.
Eventually the client was provided with an explanation of the service that he had selected. At the outset he had filled out a risk profile questionnaire and based on his answers to this a standard pre-set portfolio was selected to match level of risk. This is common practice amongst companies offering this type portfolio management service and they normally run three portfolios low risk, balanced and aggressive. A portfolio manger will be responsible for monitoring the performance of each of the funds in the portfolio. This is basically a “one size fits all” type of service.
After explaining his situation to MONTPELIER we detailed our Portfolio Management service to him and how we went through our investment selection process. The client was quite explicit on the fact that he felt let down on his previous service as he could not speak to anyone about his investment, did not get any feedback or detailed reviews of his portfolio. Additionally, given the losses to his capital, he wanted to avoid equity exposure as much as possible. So we constructed a unique portfolio for him consisting of such diverse funds as commercial property, mortgage income, bonds and commodities to achieve his goals. This combined with our office based Portfolio Team on hand to communicate with on all of the clients financial aspects, personalized quarterly reviews, regular meetings and our web based portfolio viewer will lead to the client seeing real value from our service.
