AG Delta and Soho Capital have partnered to rebrand and digitally revamp the actively-managed certificate platform that was first spearheaded by private banking and asset management integration consulting company Synpulse in early 2017.
The partnership will bring to market a platform aimed at addressing the final challenge of industrialising the digital collaboration between investment strategy sponsors (fund and asset managers), distributors (private and retail banks, insurance companies, independent asset managers and family offices) of these certificatesfor their end customers and the manufacturers (investment banks). The ability to bring to market "bespoke, actively-managed investment strategies", such as actively-managed certificates much faster than exchnage-traded funds (which take around six months) has seen growth rates of the certificates surpass ETFs in wealth management strongholds, like Switzerland, according to Frank Troise, Soho's founder.
"AG Delta's platform gave us immediate distribution among all of our target counterparts in Asia-Pacific and Europe via their platform," said Troise. "In addition, their innovative work has been recognised and awarded by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and their executives have deep domain expertise, so the decision to work together was exceptionally straightforward."
The collaboration 'is not only highly synergistic', but a 'very logical one to offer immediately a comprehensive and unique value position to what is likely going to be one of the hottest themes in 2018', according to Andrew Au (pictured), chief executive and co-founder of AG Delta. 'We have a long track record of innovation and successfully transforming the supply chain for investment products," said Au. 'Whether conventional cash forex, bond, stocks or funds to highly complex structured or alternative investments, we have delivered significantly more accessibility, investment distributor/provider choice, regulatory protection mechanisms and most importantly relevance to end customers.'
The new platform partnership will look to shorten that cycle to an unprecedented period of days while introducing, for the first time, "systematic" usage of investor preferences and feedback to enhance the relevance, suitability and appropriateness of specific strategies in demand. The platform will leverage Soho's library of manager strategies via its strategy data exchange (SDX) and AG Delta's digital wealth, regtech and big data powered solutions which has seen over US$1.5 trillion in multi-asset transactional turnover since inception.
The exchange was launched by Soho in early 2017 as a library of model portfolios that are being fed to the respective platforms of the partner investment banks to structure certificates. "While it was never in dispute that the growth in activey-managed certificates would be very well served with more choice for 'bespoke' investment strategies through SDX's global panel of strategy sponsors, it was clear that the AG Delta partnership provided an important solution to the final piece to the puzzle to achieve scale," said Troise. "AG Delta offers our asset management clients massive distribution, superior domain expertise and deep industry relationships. Now our clients have the ability to significantly amplify their marketing for these new and proprietary actively-managed certificates investment strategies."
AG Delta's platforms provide end users the ability to see these certificate strategies 'pre-Isin' and 'post-Isin', which enables asset management companies to build an order book prior to officially launching any strategy, shortening time to market for model strategies from weeks and months to days.
Troise confirmed that a new Apac structured hedge-fund like strategy wrapped as an actively-managed certificate will be launched in response to growing demand from clients seeking exposure to multi-asset portfolios and risk premia. "This new instrument will come through the platform," said Troise.
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