Advancing a new approach to market analysis

St George Bank’s specialist investment arm Advance Asset Management is set to re-position itself in a bid to differentiate its holistic communication and behaviour-driven approach to funds management in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Advance national head of distribution and sales Gregory Newman said the repositioning is part of Advance’s long-term growth strategy, which, like other St George businesses, is to achieve net inflows that exceed system growth in 2008. Last month, St George posted a record-breaking $1.16 billion net profit for the year ending September 2007.

Investment solutions general manager Patrick Farrell and senior strategist Felix Stephen stressed the repositioning, which will see Advance adopt the tagline ‘Investigate’ and the slogan ‘Rigorous Thinking’, is much more than a superficial makeover. Farrell and Stephen said the repositioning, to be officially announced at the Financial Planning Association (FPA) national conference, reflects Advance’s holistic approach to funds management. By combining emerging strategies such as communication and behaviour analysis with more traditional techniques, they believe they are better-positioned to identify market hazards and opportunities and help their advisers deal with them.

Stephen said that, when assessing potential fund managers for its single-manager, multi-manager and stand-alone funds, the team undertakes an “intense investigation” of everything from their investment philosophy and processes to their mindset, team dynamics and likely reactions in periods of high to extreme market volatility.

“It’s about leveraging information that isn’t visible to the market as a whole and delivering it to time-poor advisers,” he said. Stephen stressed that the communication and behavioural analysis and other alternative strategies for identifying market opportunities and hazards helped them predict the subprime mortgage meltdown about a year before it occurred. As such, he said they were able to alert their advisory network and help them avoid pitfalls and seize opportunities. “We were also able to help advisers communicate this information to their clients, which, in turn, helped to build a relationship of trust — something that’s especially important in periods like these of market volatility.”