Quill Group | FE Analytics Case Study

FE Analytics helps Brisbane firm track & benchmark their model portfolios

Quill Group Financial Planners is part of a Multi-Disciplinary professional services practice covering Accounting, SMSF Administration, Personal Risk Insurance and Financial Planning. With around $750 million of FUA, a growing portion of that is within SMA’s, both their own SMA’s of managed funds and other specialist direct equity SMA’s.

Director, Mark Beveridge, and his team of financial planners at Quill Group use FE Analytics to track model portfolio performance and demonstrate clients’ best interest.

The challenge
Quill had been running four model portfolios since 2013 for their advisers to use in client recommendations.

“We had no method of tracking the effectiveness of our changes, nor benchmarking the estimated return characteristics” say Mark.

Tracking and benchmarking model portfolios
The team at Quill Group chose FE Analytics because of its unique ability to keep track of their portfolios and the effect of changes over time. It also allows them to produce a research pack for their current portfolios with all the fund profiles via a link to their Lonsec subscription.

Comprehensive market data
FE Analytics incorporates data on Industry Super, SMA Universe, Market Indices and the usual range of Managed Funds and ASX Equities. This, together with tracking their model portfolios in the 'My Portfolios' function, gives the financial planners at Quill Group almost everything they need to manage and report on their fund performances.

Benefits of FE Analytics
“We now know how our portfolios are tracking against a variety of benchmarks, including CPI+ statistics, as well a customised list of competitors, and the FE Standard benchmarks.
In addition, we can see the impact of the portfolio changes, by comparing returns of the exited fund, and the incoming fund from the actual date of change, which in turn helps us to reflect on our decision-making process”.

With its extensive database of Separately Managed Accounts, Industry Super, Direct Equities, and ETF’s as well as related benchmarks, FE Analytics helps Quill Group demonstrate the equity curve of almost any combination of investments that a client may want to see compared.

“This is far more informative than a simple historical return table”.

Conclusion

Mark concludes “We love our FE Analytics subscription. As part of the evidence gathering process that you need in this new era of Best Interest Duty, you will go a long way to find a product that comes close to the functionality of FE Analytics”.