Aviva Investors partners with Iress to launch SMA

Aviva Investors has paired up with the financial services technology provider Iress Market Technology to launch a direct separately managed account (SMA).

Aviva Investors head of retail Andrew Peterson said Aviva Investors Direct SMA would use Iress’ SMA technology, and would be distributed independently of the traditional unit trust and platform environment. He claimed the new technology would “open up access to the wholesale market for retail investors, via their professional advisers”.

Iress managing director, Andrew Walsh said Iress Portfolio System provided data feed distribution to all relevant advice technologies.

“It’s quite important, because this Aviva [Investors] product is being sold through advisers. It’s important that Aviva Investors can adequately connect to the advisers and an important way of doing that is via transactional data fees,” Walsh said. He noted that Iress’ SMA technology comes with direct integration into XPLAN, COIN and VisiPlan.

Walsh highlighted that advisers were demanding rich data, which he said was often overlooked by many SMA offerings.

“Advisers are seeking more and more data in their software. They’re asking for broader and richer data. The feeds that Aviva Investors will be sending has full and rich tax component, and will be fed directly into XPLAN,” he said.