Wrap accounts have grown in popularity in recent years with most paraplanners and advisers having their favourite offering, or even offerings. Citywire has just published the results of their survey on this issue, which you can see here, which shows Transact coming out on top.
I have used Transact more than any other wrap mainly because it was the first to capture a significant part of the market but also because it works (although the website could do with an overhaul)! I have also used other wraps from Standard Life, James Hay and Nucleus as well as others and they all have their pros and cons. Please let us know which wrap you use and why and also if you have chosen not to go down the wrap route, why.
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Does anyone have any suggestions where I can get and compare fund prices from the different providers. As the AMC and bid offer spreads vary from each life office how does one judge if the client is getting a fair deal without searching through mountains of literature sent by the providers. Being new to paraplanning I may well be missing some thing obvious but I would appreciate any help.
Karen,
You are not missing anything obvious. We have just undertaken a large research project to find out the charges for a substantial number of funds from various fund supermarkets and wrap accounts and it took ages. There is no quick way to do it or central resource – it has to be done manually.
Richard
Thank you very much for looking into this for me. It is a shame that this time consuming process needs to be done manually. Maybe in the future some bright spark will come up with an easy way of doing it. In the meantime I will just continue using the very basic tool on the FSA website.
Thanks Again
Karen
Hi Karen,
Which tool are you using on the FSA site.
Hi Richard
I am just doing some research into wraps and have read good reviews about transact. You mentioned you have used transact and other various wrap providers ,would you say that you would rate transact as the best?
I would be interested in your experience.
Many thanks
HI Surena,
I do rate Transact mainly because it works and I know it well. I couldn’t say it was ‘best’ as some of the others may have caught up a bit. Transact can be relatively expensive and the website is rather dated but it does what it says on the tin. I do think that new entrants could give it a run for its money, especially AXA Elevate and the new wrap from the guy who used to run Selestia (Vasillief is his name I think). From what I have heard they say they are going to do, they should be good.
For now though, in my opinion, you should be OK with Transact.
Hi Richard
thank you for your feed back on this, this is useful to know.
Are you aware of many IFA’s using a risk profiling questionnaire for clients through a a company called FinaMetric?
I would be interested in what you think about this company and this tool.
Surena,
I use this quite a bit and overall think it is a good tool although it does need more input from the user and a bit more time to get to the end result. The website has some fantastic white papers and support information on the whole topic. I will post a more detailed review with information on the linking spreadsheet as this trips most people up. You can sign up for a 30 day free trial which is well worth doing and then running yourself through the system.
thank you Richard.
I look forward to reading the detailed review.