Sealcorp restructures SMAs
Sealcorp has restructured its separately managed account (SMA) funds, moving from investing in various underlying managed funds to a multi-manager structure using mandates, and is currently in the process of transferring all investors to the new format.
“We’ve kept the concept of being able to move the weightings from one asset sector to another but we thought we could do a lot more at the individual manager level,” director of product Dean Thomas said.
“Rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, what we decided to do was to place the individual managed funds within asset sector pools.”
Thomas said the new structure incorporated six pools including Australian equities multi-blend, international equities multi-blend, Australian fixed interest, international fixed interest, property, and alternative strategies sector, within which funds could be constructed according to risk profile.
“Why we’ve gone down that path is that it enables us to use mandates with the underlying investment managers as opposed to going into unit trusts,” he said.
Thomas said Sealcorp’s SMA funds had doubled to just over $2 billion in the last two years.
He said the new structure would also mean the funds did not have to use fund managers’ standard public offerings.
Thomas said the new structure would reduce transaction costs and capital gains tax to investors, but in the short-term there would be a small cost associated with the changes.
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