Auckland-based investment compliance firm, MyFiduciary, has secured the exclusive Australasian distribution rights for UK-built wealth management software, JHC Neon.
Launched in 2015 by UK fintech firm, JHC Systems, the Neon ‘digital wealth management dashboard’ offered a cloud-based, platform-agnostic oversight of investment portfolios, according to MyFiduciary director, Aaron Drew.
Drew said the JHC Neon tool provided an “enterprise-wide” automated in-depth view of portfolios enabling investment, risk and compliance managers to make decisions based on real-time data.
“Our clients face increasing compliance burdens, and we see there is a pressing need for a robust, flexible and automated portfolio analytics solution that can cover a broad range of assets types, and integrate a variety of data sources,” he said in a statement.
“This capability is hard to come by, but seeing what Neon has delivered to wealth and asset managers in the UK, Europe and Middle East, we knew it would be the ideal fit for our part of the world.”
Drew said MyFiduciary was already talking to a number of large firms in Australia and NZ about the JHC Neon tool, which is currently better-suited to big-end-of-town institutions.
“We see this as attractive to wealth managers, insurance and risk firms and banks,” he said.
“But we’re working with JHC to customise the system for smaller firms such as financial advisory groups.”
The JHC deal significantly expands the MyFiduciary palate, which until now has focused on governance training and support for investment firms in NZ. Founded in 2006 by Ross Fowler, MyFiduciary is “grounded in the global investment governance best practices developed [in the US] by fi360”, according to its website.
Drew said the group was looking to extend its offering to include practical portfolio oversight tools before “serendipitously” meeting a JHC Neon executive in NZ.
“The thing we liked about it is that it can be run from anywhere with any type of data,” he said. “It’s a new system that does things that others – like custodial platforms – have tried to do but couldn’t because they were using legacy systems.”
As well as his MyFiduciary role, Drew is also principal economist with the NZ Institute of Economic Research (NZIER).
According to JHC, the Neon sofware automatically “scrutinises every holding, on and off book, in every asset class, alternatives included, in every portfolio across the firm, taking full account of mandates, weightings, benchmarks and idiosyncrasies”.
Ed Lopez, JHC chief revenue officer, said the group has a number of third-party distribution deals outside its core European and Middle East markets.
“The size of the Australian and New Zealand asset management space is well known, and while there are clear overlaps with UK, European and US regulations for financial services participants, it was important to commit to the region with a proven and recognized local partner who shares our values and focus,” Lopez said in a statement. “It is clear MyFiduciary is ideal in that regard.”
Over 60 institutions globally use JHC software with collective funds under management of £150 billion.