Investment and Savings Wraps

It is important to get the terminology right here otherwise this can be very confusing.

We place clients assets on a Platform (The Nucleus Platform) mainly although we use Transact too and others from time to time). We leave these assets unwrapped, or we place them in a wrapper. The main wrappers for client's assets are

- Pension Plan
- Insurance Bond
- Cash
- ISA-Cash and Stocks and Shares

Each of these wrappers has its own tax treatment and offers certain tax advantages. Unwrapped assets can be useful too from the tax planning viewpoint, particularly in utilising the client's Capital Gains Tax allowance

Within each wrapper a client may hold assets in cash form or buy collective investment funds with the money. When we talk about unwrapped assets we are talking about ordinary cash deposits on the Platform and collective funds outwith the client's Pension Plan or ISA or Insurance Bond.

We use a Platform for client's assets because we feel it is a much better solution for clients than the way IFA's used to work. In the pre-Platform world IFA's bought products for clients directly with the providers-with Insurance Companies and Investment Houses. Valuing, monitoring and dealing with a client portfolio built up in this old way are unwieldy and unreliable tasks. On the Platform, we can see the whole of a client's portfolio at a glance, and drill down into as much detail as we need as the information on the Platform with regard to transactions and switches goes back to the very start for the client. Clients can of course access all of this detail as well. The information on the Platform is sufficient to enable us to provide all the information to the client for their tax-return AND importantly, with the client's authority, and after discussion with the client, we are able to 'switch' from one collective investment to another online. The range of collective funds we can switch to is enormous and the discounts on fund charges negotiated with the investment houses by the platform makes active management possible without ramping up the charges to the client. In the main we are able to go in and out of collective funds on the Platform without a cost.

Arriving at a mix of assets held by a client on the platform is a matter of matching the client's requirements and their attitude to risk with the factors affecting returns in the main asset class areas of Equity Shares, Bonds, and Property, and choosing amongst the range of funds on the Platform (vast) and thereafter switching from fund to fund as economic conditions change and client needs alter. We speak in detail to each and every client on these matters to begin with and at reviews thereafter. This is not an exact science. No one is infallible; we can only do our best. We generally keep a stable of 10 or so collective funds on our recommended list and allocate clients funds amongst the ten in proportions determined by the particular client's requirements and their attitude to risk. You will find our current stable of 10 in our Investment review.