The benefits of sub-advised mandates

One of the great benefits of the size and scale of WealthSelect is that it allows us to partner with leading fund managers from across the world, to deliver an expertly designed investment solution that you and your clients can trust.

As portfolio managers of WealthSelect, we are trusted to manage more than £20.4bn^[1] on behalf of more than 123,000^[1] investors. This size and scale offers us a competitive advantage. Where there is a clear customer benefit we can create bespoke strategies with third-party fund managers that can be tailored to meet our needs and those of your clients. These strategies are run within a Quilter Investors fund, where we ‘own’ the investment vehicle but appoint a third-party fund manager to run it.

These bespoke strategies, known as sub-advised mandates, are where we set a mandate and one of our WealthSelect global partners is appointed to run the mandate based on their experience, style, and expertise. Our WealthSelect global partners are a select group of high-quality asset managers that have a strong competitive edge in their respective asset class or market.

The benefits are clear

One of the many benefits of this approach is the information advantage offered by sub-advised mandates. They enable far greater transparency of the portfolio positioning, holdings, and trading than investing via a retail fund.

This is a key differentiator for us. If we were to purchase a manager’s retail fund offering, we’d need to rely on the published fund reporting which, by necessity, trails events. Instead, sub-advised mandates give quicker access.

This benefit of being able to look under the bonnet of the fund delivers an information advantage that enables us to finely-tune style considerations such as value and growth or market-cap positioning in the WealthSelect Portfolios.

This greater visibility is a powerful tool when it comes to the construction and rebalancing of the portfolios.

A world of choice

Between them, our WealthSelect global partners offer close to 5,000 different fund strategies from which we can choose. By having our own UK-based funds, where we control the investment vehicle and appoint managers, we have the option to select from all available strategies, rather than being limited to those run solely in UK-based funds.

One of the best examples of this is the Quilter Investors US Equity Growth Fund managed by J.P. Morgan’s Felise Agranoff. The fund is managed in the same way as the J.P. Morgan US Growth Advantage Strategy, one of well over 200 different fund strategies managed by J.P. Morgan globally.

However, the retail fund isn’t made available to UK investors. Thanks to our partnership with J.P. Morgan we’ve been able to offer investors access to this highly successful, multi-cap growth strategy in WealthSelect. This is a good illustration of how your clients benefit from our access to world-class managers.

The creation of a sub-advised mandate comes down to finding a strategy that appeals, with a manager that can demonstrate a robust and repeatable investment process. However, a sub-advised mandate also allows us to refine the investment strategy to reflect a desired customer objective. We can tailor anything about an underlying strategy, from its objectives or risk parameters to implementing responsible investment considerations.

A good example of this tailoring is the Quilter Investors Europe (ex UK) Equity Income Fund managed by Schroders. We liked the philosophy and process employed by the European Value team at Schroders, but it didn’t run a Europe ex-UK strategy. So, we worked closely with Schroders to tailor a strategy to our needs, which would exclude the UK. This strategy was added to the portfolios in September 2020.

Trading advantages

Occasionally, fund managers retire, or leave for new fund management groups. In these scenarios, a sub-advised mandate provides a far more effective way to transfer our investment to a preferred manager than if we needed to sell-down units in a standard fund and repurchase a new strategy. Instead a new manager can be appointed to the sub-advised mandate, making the process seamless and efficient and of real benefit to you and your clients.

^[1] Source: Quilter Investors as at 31 May 2025.