Staying ahead of the pack

For InvestorWeb Research’s senior investment analyst Rodney Sebire, the growing interest from advisers to add in-house research offerings to their business is of no great concern.

Sebire says many advisory groups do not have a full-scale research operation similar to a research house. He says the in-house research is therefore merely an extension of the planning group’s due diligence.

“The [principal advisers] are taking six and five-star ratings and using this to filter what they’re going to invest in,” Sebire says.

“At the adviser level, everyone is doing their own thing. A lot of it depends on the sophisticated nature of the client, as to whether they’ll invest in [asset classes like] hedge funds, whereas for the mum and dad investors they’ll usually stick it in a managed fund.”

Sebire says another reason InvestorWeb is not concerned is because in the new regulatory environment, there are a lot of mandates where research is required by advisers when recommending products.

“It’s a bit different now with wrap accounts. If you’re providing a super product and you’re acting as the trustee they have to make sure the recommended product is of quality,” he says.

However, the main reason Sebire is unconcerned is because he believes the research market in Australia is already over serviced. So there is no benefit for smaller groups to offer research as no one is ahead of the pack.

The need to stand out from the crowd is something Sebire says InvestorWeb is currently working on, despite the group being viewed poorly by the advisory industry.

He says with IWL’s primary business — the financial planning software package VisiPlan — having 60 percent market share, InvestorWeb is working on a way to more effectively integrate research into the software.

“We want to better integrate [our research] to the point where if you’re doing a plan, then bang, you’ve also got research reports,” he says.

As for InvestorWeb’s popularity in the advisory industry, Sebire says he was not aware that InvestorWeb was considered unprofessional and rated poorly in categories such as depth of experience — as revealed in the Money Management Rating the Raters survey.

He says because he is not aware of which fund managers completed the survey, InvestorWeb takes such surveys with a grain of salt.

“We’re not here to be people’s friends. We’re here to get the best products,” Sebire says.

IWL’s total product suite includes InvestorWeb Research, VisiPlan and VisiWeb, Mercury, Virtual Broker, VisiTrusted Network, BizmaX, and ACS.