Professional Planner|Zenith Fund Awards 2015 – Distributor of the Year
Winner: Fidante Partners
Zenith says: As a first-time winner in this category, Zenith recognises Fidante Partners’ distribution capabilities for its suite of high-quality investment boutiques across a range of asset classes. Information provision, access to investment professionals, effective education and communication of manager strategies, and ongoing updates remain of the highest quality. Finally, a well-resourced and experienced sales team with extensive knowledge of the product suite combines to make Fidante Partners a worthy winner of the category.
Rommel Hacopian, general manager, platforms and national key accounts, Fidante and Challenger (pictured): We’ve been fortunate that we have a number of boutiques that create persistent, consistent levels of income for our clients, particularly in the retirement phase; and managers like Bentham, Kapstream, to name a couple, that are working toward income complementing growth has been a market shift that we have been very well positioned to take advantage of at Fidante.
From our perspective, we don’t feel like we’ve knocked anyone off the top perch. Distribution is one of those areas where it can be highly quantitative, but even more so, qualitative. We have enormous respect for [last year’s winner] Macquarie and the work that they do. We have, however, even more so in the last few years focused not on the awards so much, but making sure that Zenith, their consultants, the financial planners that Zenith service and the market more generally, is heavily serviced.
We have a very strong business development team, very experienced. Between that and the key accounts team, and the marketing and product teams, we just make sure that the service we provide…has in the last year, been able to just edge ahead of Macquarie and we’re very pleased.
Fidante has the benefit of being part of a top 100 company in Challenger Limited. Challenger, as a big corporate partner, has the ability to add resources, depth, personnel and all the supporting infrastructure you would expect that any business would require. So rather than being a small distributor and a small group of four or five managers, we’ve got the ability to leverage off Challenger group, and provide those broader support services and therefore attract boutiques and have a more scalable number of boutiques.
This is attractive because some managers want the benefit of running their own business, but also having a large corporate partner alongside them.