Manchester-based stockbroker and wealth manager WH Ireland has added new tools to help wealth managers and advisers select and monitor structured products in its online structured products investment platform SPGO.
"Structured product users who want an independent place they can go to conduct due diligence, invest centrally and crucially conduct post purchase regulatory monitoring of the product's they have bought now have somewhere to go," said SPGO managing director Phil Taylor. "Best of all, it's totally free of charge."
According to Taylor the tools have been added to help financial advisers wishing to remain independent in light of the retail distribution review (RDR), with a full research library function allowing advisers to consider the whole of the structured products market.
The new comparison centre will allow advisers to classify products by a range of features and then compare them to other similar structures. The report generated will be printable to help with the due diligence process. To meet advisers and managers regulatory obligations SPGO allows them to add current and historic structured product holdings to their individual accounts for ongoing monitoring.
The SPGO score, another of the tools introduced by the platform, is a scoring system for all of the structured products published to its platform. The score is made up of two inputs which themselves consider a number of relevant factors including the counterparty strength and the product complexity and potential return. The SPGO Credit Score looks at the five-year issuer's credit default swap (CDS) and the credit rating from the three main global rating agencies and ranks them on a scale from one to ten.