Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) announced today that its bestconnect retail electronic dealing platform will offer trading in unit trusts and OEICs from July 2003 in conjunction with JPMorgan FundsHub, the fund aggregation, dealing and settlement service the American bank founded with Investia and later acquired.
DrKW says the new service is aimed at larger discretionary wealth managers. It says it is already actively working with four of the UK’s largest discretionary managers, with over 2 billion of assets invested in UK unit trusts. It is anticipated further clients will be added to the service in the coming year.
The deal makes bestconnect the first retail service provider to offer a one-stop trading hub for UK stockbrokers in mutual funds as well as cash equities, covered warrants, and investment trusts. By working with JP Morgan FundsHub, the new service – ‘bestconnect tm funds’ – is able to offer access to around 2,500 unit trusts from approximately 80 fund managers.
“To date, many discretionary managers have been reluctant to increase their exposure to unit trusts because of the high costs and inefficiency of manual and paper-based dealing,” says Maneesh Jain, Head of bestconnect tm at DrKW. “Furthermore, those managers have told us that they would add significantly to their holdings in unit trusts if they were provided with an efficient dealing, settlement and reconciliation solution. This is where our new service comes in: bestconnect tm funds will offer convenient electronic access, cost effective dealing and standardised settlement for unit trusts to UK stockbrokers for the first time.”
Mark Lund, CEO of FundsHub, added: “DrKW and FundsHub share the view that this initiative represents a significant step towards increasing the demand for unit trusts as an investment product in the UK. The combined strengths of DrKW’s bestconnect tm platform as a leading RSP and FundsHub’s outstanding fund trading technology and services will provide a very powerful proposition in the marketplace.”