The year in focus
"Clients trust us to be independent and transparent in providing financial planning and wealth management solutions," says Chief Executive Richard Spilg. "To ensure proper focus while delivering integrated solutions, we have three main business lines – private client services, corporate pensions and benefit services and asset management."
Our Private Client team works closely with other specialist divisions in the firm to ensure that the advice we give high net worth clients meets their often complex financial requirements. We also collaborate closely with colleagues across the firm to provide value added advice and administrative solutions to corporate clients in the critically important area of corporate benefit plans. In this area we have recently taken on the administration of The British Land Group of Companies Pension Scheme.
Clients appreciate our independence and the fact that our advice is based on direct experience. We have an impressive record of multi-manager portfolio management for over a decade, adding value to clients through appropriate asset allocation, manager selection and monitoring.
On the asset management side, our managed funds have achieved another year of strong performance. Fitzwilliam Balanced Growth has been a top-quartile performer for the period since its inception in 1995 and the sustained success of this fund was recognised again this year with a second successive Real Adviser award. The Fitzwilliam Commodity Plus Fund, available to professional investors and high net worth clients, was awarded the European Fund of Hedge Funds Award 2007 for best performing energy/commodity fund.
Fund Manager Sharon Segal, to whom Citywire gave AA status in 2006, credits this success to our hands-on approach: "We attach a lot of importance to face-to-face meetings. We like to back managers who are personally engaged with their funds – we find they tend to perform better."
We have continued to develop the range of Fitzwilliam funds, which have grown by almost 62 per cent from £178m to £288m. Two new funds were launched in December 2006 – the Balanced Income and Strategic Bond funds – and in January 2007 we launched a third property-related fund, investing in the UK and Western Europe. We now offer nine dedicated funds, which provide our clients with a wide choice of investment options.
Looking ahead
Next year will be a year of continued investment in the business,” says Richard. “We have grown rapidly over the past few years and now need to ensure that we continue to deliver service of the highest quality to our clients.
"We believe that recently announced regulatory initiatives, including MiFID and the Retail Distribution Review, will move the market in ways that play to our strengths and we are keen to position our business to take full advantage of this."
