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Scottish Life enhances fund range
30 March 2010
Scottish Life, the pensions specialist arm of the Royal London Group, has added 39 new funds to its investment fund range, expanding into 18 new sectors, with 5 new investment partners.
The enhanced range of funds gives advisers greater choice when building portfolios for all types of client, in all market conditions.
As a key part of its overall governance, Scottish Life has focused on selecting funds which:
- Have a high quality management and investment process.
- Are rated by Old Broad Street Research (OBSR), where appropriate.
- Have a strong track record of meeting their objectives and delivering competitive returns without taking excessive risk.
- Are competitively priced – if all else is equal, Scottish Life will choose the lower cost option.
- Bring something new to the range – complementing the existing funds, not duplicating them.
Scottish Life now offers 132 carefully selected funds, with a choice of 47 different sectors, making it easier for advisers to build high quality portfolios for their clients. Scottish Life’s approach also reduces the time advisers have to spend on fund selection, while giving enough choice to add value to their clients. To make the review process easier, Scottish Life monitors the fund on an ongoing basis to make sure their quality is maintained. Instead of building the biggest fund range, Scottish Life has focused on building the best and keeping it the best.
The benefits of a focused fund range include:
- It saves advisers time – Scottish Life analyse a vast universe of funds.
- Advisers benefit from in-house research and governance capability.
- It’s easier for advisers to find the funds they want.
- It provides enough choice to accommodate the needs of all types of client, in all market conditions.
- It helps to ensure advisers can always recommend high quality funds.
Nick Leitch, Head of Investment Marketing at Scottish Life said:
“The whole point of improving our fund range is to make it as straightforward as possible for advisers to build top notch portfolios for their clients. While it would be easy to offer the whole fund universe, this wouldn’t add value for the vast majority of people. In fact, offering too many funds just makes it harder to spot the stars and avoid the dogs.
“So, instead, we’ve done the hard work and used our in-house research capability to identify a focused range of top quality funds, in a wide variety of sectors, which we then monitor through our governance process to ensure the quality is maintained.
“While this enhancement has added 39 new funds, the benefit isn’t about adding numbers, it’s about adding real value.”
Further information about our fund range is available at www.scottishlife.co.uk/newfunds.
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For further information please contact:
Scottish Life
Alasdair Buchanan, Head of Communication
0131 456 7133
Nick Leitch, Head of Investment Marketing
0131 456 7891
Polhill Communications
Sally Biggs
020 7655 0520
Editor’s Notes:
Past performance is not a guide to the future. Prices can go down as well as up. Investment returns may fluctuate and are not guaranteed.
Scottish Life was founded in 1881 in Edinburgh as a proprietary company, becoming a mutual company in 1968.
On 1 July 2001, Scottish Life demutualised and transferred its business to The Royal London Mutual Insurance Society Limited. Scottish Life is a division of Royal London and is the specialist pensions business within the Group, providing individual and group pensions to the market via intermediaries.
Scottish Life and Royal London’s other intermediary businesses are based mainly in Edinburgh where 1,150 staff are employed, with 700 working in other parts of the UK and overseas.
Royal London Group is a specialist financial service provider. Its businesses focus on those sectors of the market which value quality propositions, operating through a number of brands:
- Scottish Life – UK pensions market
- Bright Grey – UK protection market
- Scottish Provident – UK protection market
- Royal London 360° – offshore investment markets
- RLAM – fund management
- RLAS – life and pensions administration
- Fundsdirect / Ascentric – funds supermarket; Wrap platform
Royal London also distributes life and pensions products through Santander’s UK branch networks.
Royal London is the largest mutual life and pensions company in the UK with Group funds under management of £35.9 billion. Group businesses serve around 3.4 million customers and employ 2,800 people. Figures quoted are as at 31 December 2009.
