Wealth news
Marighetti exits DB
Luca Marighetti, the man who fronted Deutsche Bank’s pioneering “guided architecture” policy, establishing distribution deals with eight preferred external fund management groups, is about to leave the company.
The bank would not comment, but there was originally talk of internal conflict. Deutsche’s in-house funds group, DWS, claimed to be marginalised, and had to look elsewhere, away from bank branches, for fund sales. But since DWS was included as a strategic partner, DWS funds have once again become best sellers. Mr Marighetti also has lauded the power of distributors such as Deutsche, who command increasingly high retrocession fees from fund manufacturers, keen to appear on official buy-lists.
Mr Marighetti astounded delegates at the recent PWM Open Architecture forum, when he claimed there were “no politics within Deutsche Bank.” Most took this to mean quite the opposite.
Prudential link-up
European life insurance offices are increasingly selling third-party funds and Northern Trust is the latest asset manager to exploit the trend.
The US-based house has been hired by the UK’s Prudential to supply multi-manager solutions to defined contribution pension scheme clients.
According to Cerulli Associates, life companies are driving a rise in Europe of unit-linked funds supplied by third parties from 12 per cent to 20 per cent.
The Prudential-Northern Trust partnership will allow clients to access three products through Prudential’s Money Purchase Pension: Northern Trust’s UK Equity fund,
international equity fund and UK aggregate fixed income fund.
Andy Briggs, director of business to business at Prudential, said the deal was struck in order to “strengthen our investment proposition and provide real choice and a wide range of risk profiles to suit all our clients”. SEI Investments and Frank Russell were in the running for the mandate.
Analysis platform
Zurich-based Swissrisk Wealth Management Solutions has launched Client Advisory Suite, a portfolio analysis platform for client advisers in private and retail banking. The tool enables systematic and event-driven portfolio monitoring and evaluation, which aims to promote a proactive client advisory approach.
A recent survey by Reuters and Booz Allen Hamilton found that the lack of unprompted and original investment advice from banks was a major gripe among private clients.
