Aegis Hits $3 Billion Milestone

Aegis Hits $3 Billion Milestone

AUCKLAND. Aegis, New Zealand’s largest electronic wrap platform provider has reached the $3 billion mark in funds under administration.

Aegis, which is part of the ASB Group, said growth was due mainly to a focus on working more closely with a selective number of high quality financial advisors.

The wrap service, which was launched in 1998, currently provides services to around 13,000 investment clients of 47 financial advisory groups.

“The big growth for us has come from an increasing number of advisory groups who like the fact that we are neutral in the selection of investments,” says Aegis General Manager Paul Baldwin. “Our focus is on delivering services that help advisors manage their clients’ investment portfolios and services that help them grow profitable businesses.”

Aegis says this independence has been vital in growing funds under administration by $400 million in the past year, a level of growth that Aegis has averaged over the last seven years.

“It’s interesting to note that half the assets are in managed funds and the other half are directly held investments such as shares and fixed interest,” says Mr Baldwin. “As Aegis does not dictate where funds are invested, this mix is an absolute reflection of the investment preferences of advisors and their clients.”

A major development that will help drive further growth for Aegis was the creation of a specialist fixed interest trading facility, launched late in 2005. Aegis experienced increasing demand by advisors for help to solve the significant amount of manual work surrounding bonds and term deposits and developed a wholesale trading system for these assets. “In February last year we had meetings with key advisory organisations and finance companies to investigate trading fixed interest investments at a wholesale level,” says Mr Baldwin.

In October Aegis began testing this system and initial results show that the service will significantly reduce the administration work for advisory groups, Aegis, and issuers of fixed interest.

“We know there is strong demand for this service from advisory groups that already use Aegis, who have traditionally managed a portion of their ‘fixed interest only’ clients outside of Aegis,” says Mr Baldwin. “We believe that this new service will also be popular with a number of groups not currently using Aegis.”

- END –

© Scoop Media