The Innovation category was hotly contested at the IMAP Managed Account Awards, with Elston Asset Management taking out the award for its approach to stakeholder communications.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Elston Asset Management took out the inaugural IMAP Managed Accounts Award for Innovation, with its commitment to developing and improving effective communication resources for advisers and their clients using Elston’s managed account service, already highly recognised within the industry.

Elston Head of Asset Management, Nick Revis believes the company’s constant evolution and improvement of services and process, is at the core of its approach to innovation.

“Having run managed accounts for over years, Elston has learnt very quickly that a successful managed accounts service needs to provide a higher level of investment communication support, given the transparent nature of the managed account structure,” Nick says.

“It’s no longer good enough to provide historical monthly or quarterly investment updates, particularly when the end client has full visibility of the investment decisions being made in their portfolio.”

According to Nick, Elston has spent a lot of time evolving its service to include same day SMS and email notifications to advisers, with a video update from the portfolio managers outlining the rationale for any portfolio change. This ensures advisers are fully prepared for any client enquiries they may receive, and it also enables them to be proactive with their own client communications.

“We’ve also developed a secure online SMA Adviser Resources library, with 24/7 access to all of our factsheets, performance reporting, individual company research reports and a full look through of the underlying portfolio. We also provide 12/24 months forecast yield reports on all of our portfolios to assist advisers with managing income requirements for their end clients,” Nick says.

Improving tax-efficiency

Elston is a firm believer in the real benefits of the managed account structure, particularly the ability to deliver not only transparency but also greater tax-efficiency through holding direct assets where practical.

“Although in an SMA structure we don’t have visibility of the end investor and can’t manage the portfolio to their specific tax situation, we are the only SMA investment manager I’m aware of that is working with platforms to deliver this tax effectiveness through offering super and non-super variants of our models,” Nick says.

“This at least enables us to make investment decisions around certain investment transactions, like rights issues and buy backs, taking into consideration the superannuation/pension vs individual tax rates. We feel with the development of technology within the platform space, the functionality to deliver tax aware investing within managed accounts will improve and the gap between SMA and IMAs will decrease.”

A journey of improvement

In awarding Elston Asset Management the IMAP Managed Account Award for Innovation, the judges were impressed with the company’s approach to communications with its advisers and clients.

Nick believes the award is peer recognition and endorsement of the journey Elston has been on for the past 10 years and more.

“It’s our opinion that innovation is the by product of constant hard work and improvement, and we are continuing to look at ways we can enhance and improve the way we support advisers in executing a successful managed accounts solution in their business,” Nick says.

“A lot of people may not be aware but our name is taken from the ancestral home of Charles Darwin (Elston House) and our logo is the double helix of a DNA strand. These were chosen to represent the ideals of evolution and constant improvement within our business – it’s our business DNA and we look forward to continuing to evolve and improve our managed account offering for advisers and investors in the years ahead.”

Finalists

IMAP congratulates all the finalists in the Innovation category.

• Dynamic Asset Consulting
• Elston Asset Management
• Financial Simplicity
• Fincast
• Managed Accounts