Part of the Asset Allocator team has recently come back from holiday so we thought the best way to mark their return was to sit down for a chat with Premier Miton’s newly-installed head of MPS, Chris Robinson.
They launched their MPS in June and Robinson joined from Tatton to head up the taskforce, with his main focus on providing advisers with as much transparency as possible.
“I want to make sure that information is passed in the correct way, and part of the reason I joined was to make sure that I could give and support advisers and clients with as much information as possible at the right technical level,” he said.
“That's really important in our industry with consumer duty, that we're giving as much information, we're as transparent as possible, but ultimately, it's the right level of information for advisers and clients.”
Their MPS range, consisting of passive and blended solutions, is launched in tandem with their existing multi-asset products. It also uses parts of their own Liberation multi-manager fund, which helps navigate some of the difficulties of launching on platform, such as investing into alts and calming CGT worries.
“Some clients will quite rightly fit into our multi-asset fund range, other clients will sit nicely within the MPS, and that's great for the advisers,” said Robinson.
However, at this juncture they have decided not to release either a purely active or a sustainable MPS wrapper, so we thought we’d inquire as to why.
Ian Rees said they’ve come to market with the core products most desired by advisers, allowing them to access full active management in their existing multi-asset funds.
However, they acknowledged that launching a range of sustainable portfolios was "impossible" due to the regulatory environment.
Rees says it’s one to watch, but that they don’t feel as if they need to do anything yet, “because we haven't seen sufficient enough demand or interest from advisers.”
Robinson taking the reins has not led to any significant shake-up of the portfolios themselves, however one area the team is keen on right now is avoiding regions per se, and going global with their investment views.
Using this lens, the UK looks particularly attractive, said Rees.
“You've got this interesting dynamic at the current time where in those global sectors, you've got the US components on almost twice the valuations of some UK and European indices,” he said. “So I can actually have exposure to similar sectors as the US, but I can be a little more agnostic to where they’re domiciled and actually go where some of the valuation attraction is.”
