Zenith defies underdog status
| Rate the Raters 2012 |
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Zenith may be the underdog when comparing the resources of other ratings houses, but Money Management’s Rate the Raters 2012 proved you don’t need shiny toys to play with the big boys.
Zenith were narrowly edged out by Lonsec who pulled a bigger slice of the fund manager pie, rating 89 per cent of respondents compared to Zenith’s 67 per cent.
But fund managers were impressed by Zenith’s ‘research methodology’, ‘transparency’, ‘quality and experience of personnel’ and ‘feedback’, rating the researcher over 50 per cent in the highest category on all questions.
Zenith director David Wright said Zenith had “beefed up” reporting for clients with multiple funds and upgraded its individual funds reports suite over the past 12 months, which may have pushed them above the mark.
“In this difficult environment, advisers are looking for any sort of angle or story or information they can take to clients about it (the product), so it just provides a greater depth in terms of the break-down of portfolio returns and also greater detail in terms of the underlying stock they’re holding,” he said.
\Wright said Zenith had expanded feedback to include risk ratings in an absolute return sense and also in relation to specific asset classes. The company incorporated learnings from recent soft cases against advisers – mainly advice on how to use and blend products and match client types, according to Wright.
Zenith rated 68 per cent ‘above average’ and 32 per cent ‘average’ for the quality and experience of personnel, although Wright said sourcing the right people and retaining them was difficult in the research industry.
He said the company had also invested in its alternative investments research team which he said was, coincidentally, very timely.
“With the way that investment markets have been, clearly you’ve needed other strategies and/or asset classes to help generate returns. Traditional market strategies are making it difficult in some parts to generate attractive returns,” he said.
Zenith received minimal negative feedback, stumbling only slightly on the issue of ‘transparency’ with 6 per cent of respondents rating it as ‘poor’. But the overall results revealed the small fish Zenith is making a big splash in the ratings house world.
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