Our institutional investment approach

Institutional best practice

We adopt ‘institutional best practice’ when running investment portfolios for our clients.

This know-how overarches every aspect of our service, from rigorous quantitative modelling that evaluates the performance of model portfolios across thousands of potential economic scenarios, through to responsible investment research, fee comparisons and negotiation, detailed fund due diligence and daily fund monitoring.

We pride ourselves on the wider care and attention we pay to our service, including ‘behind the scenes’ aspects such as platform configuration and reconciliation, regulatory documentation (including target market definitions) and of course, demonstrating added value in-line with Consumer Duty.

1

We invest for the long-term

Although we're constantly monitoring portfolios, markets and underlying funds, we do not typically make short-term changes to investments. Our portfolios are designed, by intent, to be robust to multiple different economic scenarios, thereby avoiding unnecessary time ‘out of the market’, alongside associated trading costs. We prefer, if possible, to make changes annually as opposed to weekly, or monthly.
2

We look to reduce costs

It is not uncommon for HRIS to source fund fee discounts of 25% or above. We use our research and scale to compare fund costs across multiple providers, negotiate lower fees and ultimately source funds offering our clients the best value for money. Our investment operations team works closely with platforms to gain access to the restricted fund share classes made available to HRIS and its clients.
3

We focus on robust & evidence based strategic asset allocation

We apply significant resources, including our in-house modelling and research capabilities, to determine long-term portfolio asset allocations - tested across 1000's of potential future economic scenarios. This is because portfolio's exposure to asset classes has by far the greatest impact on risk and return.

The HRIS asset allocation process is sufficiently strong that it is adopted by Defaqto and a number of major MPS and Multi-Asset fund providers.
4

We diversify portfolios

Our portfolios are diversified across style, asset class, geography, and fund managers. Portfolios typically hold over 25-30 underlying funds, giving exposure to thousands of underlying securities, across the globe.