Investmaster Group Limited, a UK-based supplier of systems to wealth managers and institutional brokers, has entered a partnership with COR Financial Solutions to create tools to meet regulatory demands to ‘Know Your Client’ (KYC).
Investmaster is to supply CORS’s BITA Star client risk profiling and strategic asset allocation application, designed for the private client investment management community, with its own product suite.
The move by Investmaster comes in response to an increase in interest by its customers for risk profiling and strategic asset allocation functionality, a need further supported by recent research conducted on Investmaster’s behalf by an independent research company. Investmaster expects this demand to continue to grow significantly in the future. Driven primarily by the new FSA initiative, ‘Treating the customer fairly’, which sees new regulations in place to better monitor the issue of ‘suitability’ and ‘fairness’, investment managers are now required to demonstrate that they have given advice appropriate to clients’ appetite for risk and return and are adhering to good practice.
The partnership sees Investmaster provide best-of-breed, proven technology from COR Financial Solutions that will enable fund managers to match client risk/return requirements with an appropriate portfolio and provide a consistency of approach for all its clients. Product features include a very sophisticated and flexible risk profiling questionnaire, comprehensive analysis and client reporting and asset class level allocation. BITA Star will also help users build bespoke portfolios for clients and suggest suitable alternative model funds or products for clients.
Furthermore, BITA Star records questionnaire responses and all related data so that clients’ requirements can be tracked and reviewed over time in order that portfolios can be monitored and re-balanced as required. Flexibility is a key requirement for fund managers in delivering client risk assessment with different clients needing an individual approach. With BITA Star, fund managers are able to design their own client risk assessment questionnaire, define the asset classes and benchmarks they wish to include. Comprehensive reporting facilities are also available to enable a broad set of reports for both internal and client use. Client reports can be made as simple or complex as required, depending on a client’s need for information or understanding of the investment process.
Simon Tizard, Strategic Development Director at Investmaster commented: “At Investmaster, we are currently looking to build on our success by partnering with companies that offer ‘best in market’ products to add to our existing Wealthmaster and 4i product suites. In BITA Star, COR Financial Solutions have a feature rich and flexible product that we feel will appeal to our customers and meet both their regulatory requirements and their own clients’ expectations.” Commenting on the partnership, Chris Brooke, Business Development Director at COR Financial Solutions: “We are delighted to be able to partner with Investmaster to supply BITA Star alongside Investmaster’s established product suite.
Investmaster is a market leader in the wealth management solutions sector in the UK and we believe that its expertise and market presence will enable us to add more customers to the growing list of BITA Star customers. The integrated product set will extend the business benefits already demonstrated by BITA Star and further reduce the business and regulatory risks faced by wealth managers today.”