The company, which has assets under management of £450m, was founded by managing partners Simon Armstrong and Jon Macintosh in 2004, with the intention of offering retail clients an investment management service previously “only available to the super-rich”.
Speaking to IA, Macintosh said Saltus hopes regulation will be a key force in driving financial advisers to use its services which will “take the onus of choosing funds away from the adviser and put them onto the investment manager”.
“We have a team which chooses funds all day long and, with regulatory initiatives like the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive review(MiFID II) and the review of the Insurance Mediation Directive making it less attractive for advisers to choose funds, we believe advisers will benefit from
using our services,” said Macintosh.
For its push outside of the UK,Saltus has employed the services of Alpha Diversify which is run by partners Simon Bottle and Paddy Burtt.
Fund promoter Alpha Diversify was most recently working with ARIA Capital Management, a UK headquartered investment services company.
Discretionary management has recently become more mainstream in the UK, in part due to regulatory pressures such as from the Retail Distribution Review.
Asked about the appetite for outsourced investment solutions from advisers outside the UK Bottle said the market is clearly much less crowded but that, in Europe particularly, it is reaching a “tipping point” as advisers begin to see the benefits of outsourcing investment management decisions.
“Over the past few weeks we have gained some traction with business owners who can see that having their advisers picking funds just doesn’t make sense when they can have experts do it,” added Bottle.
Saltus offers three “access points” to its fund management expertise – through its bespoke discretionary fund management services, for clients with £100k plus of investable assets, through its three model portfolios, for clients with £25k of investable assets and through a unitised version of its Saltus 67 model portfolio.
