Daniel Rodwell said:
“The fundamental belief was that these asset classes had potential to grow significantly and to reach a much wider audience but were being held back by the inefficiencies of manual administration,”
While the firm has helped the UK industry make good progress on this, the CEO notes that there is still a lot of work to do. With the mass adoption of main market advisor platforms, advisers were used to simple and efficient investment allocation, administration and portfolio management. “It felt strange to me that there was no platform providing any of these efficiencies within the tax efficient and alternatives sectors, and at that point GrowthInvest was born,” exclaimed Rodwell. GrowthInvest is seeking to make tax-efficient and private market investing more accessible to a growing market, a market Rodwell believes is becoming increasingly important to advisers, wealth managers and private banks and is ‘underserved’ by main market platforms.
Rodwell explained, “Our aim is to drive increased engagement with the UK tax-efficient industry, alongside the wider private markets by providing a platform that mitigates barriers to growth, such as inefficient paper-driven administration, lack of clear transparency around fees and costs, and portfolio diversification difficulties.”
Unique selling point
While the alternative and tax-efficient market has several key players, Rodwell insists GrowthInvest stands out because its technology is built around the firm’s specialist knowledge of the market. Clients of GrowthInvest benefit from digital investment access to a number of key products as well as their ability to onboard historic client portfolios, enabling centralised portfolio reporting across all alternative assets.
“Above all, our offering is underpinned by a real focus and understanding that the interaction between the technology and client service is key. Our team brings vast experience from other markets to help drive excellent, institutional-level client service to clients.”
Wealth management challenges In a sector rapidly evolving, the challenges being faced by wealth management firms are inevitably changing. According to Rodwell, a key issue is that many clients are still facing problems that stem from a lack of a single clear view of their customers and their portfolios – often due to legacy systems and disparate data sets, or a hugely disparate universe of assets with no standardised reporting mechanism.
“This is a particular issue in light of the continued theme for consolidation in the wealth management marketplace, and we have been working with a number of aggregators, and helping them standardise, and to some extent monetise, alternative assets portfolios across a diverse set of adviser firms they have recently bought.”
On the regulatory side, Rodwell cited the FCA’s recent introduction of new definitions and regulations around high-risk investments, a term that
covers many of the products on GrowthInvest’s platform. He also referenced Consumer Duty, the legislation that will be introduced in the UK later this year.
“This legislation will require financial advisers and wealth managers to make considerable changes and be prepared at all stages to positively illustrate that they are acting and have acted in the best interests of the client. That is hard to do without a strong grip on every aspect of their investment portfolio – including alternatives.”
Rodwell said his company provides advisers and wealth managers with transparency, efficiency and control around their alternative advice proposition. He exclaimed:
“This starts with an initial process to centralise and onboard all client assets, and provide a clear basis for review and analysis, all of which is updated daily. The clients and advisers then have access to a whole market set of investment offers, backed by an extensive library of educational materials alongside independent research. This allows them to grow and expand their clients’ portfolios in the right way, backed by accurate data.”
Growth plans
Over the last year, GrowthInvest has seen a continuation of growth in AUA, new investment flows and new firms adopting and embedding its technology, states Rodwell. The company has also signed over 200 financial advisers, wealth management firms or private banks in the last 12 months alone. He continued:
“Working with an increasing number of large institutions, we have invested heavily in flexible technology, such that we can easily integrate into their existing systems and processes. We expect this to drive deeper relationships with these larger clients and their customers, solving new problems across broader asset classes.”
“We are already established as the market-leading adviser platform technology in the UK tax-efficient marketplace. However, we are confident this model can be replicated across global private markets – and we will continue to onboard an increasing number of PE, VC and broader private markets assets as well as solve inefficiencies for our clients”.
