Asset Management Marketing Focus #17

Kurtosys expresses their best wishes to all starting in their new positions.

Website Spotlight: Global X Funds

Our search for great ETF-centric websites continues, and this offering from Global X Funds is a mammoth montage of its 50+ ETF offerings. By maintaining a focus purely on the products, this site is essentially putting all of its web content eggs into an ETF basket.

That’s the main draw here: you come for an ETF, and stay for the vast library of them which Global X displays to you in a beautifully segmented manner.

The main graphics are minimalist yet impressionable, and the site’s content is mainly divided into two tabs: FUND MAP, and FUND LIST. The FUND MAP segments its ETFs by solutions, with the relevant fund page links then segmented further by sub-headings. It’s worth noting that the blend of text and images is far from imposing, with an attractive colour scheme.

The FUND LIST is exactly what you’d expect: a long-form list devoid of images, but is high in user experience due to the ability for the page visitor to arrange the columns by alphabetical order, total AUM and other factors.

The fund factsheets, on both pages, are PDFs which open in separate tabs, containing a swathe of fund information including industry breakdown pie charts, performance figures, disclaimers and trading details.

Global X Funds knows that it is their products that do all the talking here. The design of the website is discreet and stylish, but serves the purpose to place the huge amounts of the provider’s ETFs at the forefront. It’s a delightful resource centre for both the casual and experienced ETF investor and, very importantly, the site renders down well for mobile use.

Fund in Focus: Apollo Capital Crypto Fund

Following on from last week’s first bitcoin mutual fund in Europe, another crypto-themed fund launch has been announced by Apollo Capital. Hoping to roll out its $30 million fund in Australia in early 2018, it will mark the country’s first fund to invest in digital currencies.

The minimum buy-in is intended to be 50,000 Australian dollars, and open to wholesale clients. A long term investment strategy for the majority of the portfolio (focusing on Bitcoin and Ethereum – the more ‘mainstream’ and well-known currencies of their kind) will still run, but a small allocation will look to the short-term opportunities offered by more niche Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) which have been perforating the investment market.

There’s a lot of potential for high return in cryptocurrencies. It’s a lucrative business, but Non-Executive Chairman of Apollo Capital – Domenic Carosa – identifies that the fund shows promise due to decades of expertise in venture and crypto matters.
If the proposed plans for the fund go ahead, its rollout to the Australian market will be another big promotional boost for ICOs the world over.
Further information: Finextra | Which-50

MiFID II News

MiFID II News: The Return. In keeping with the Lynchian vibe, the characteristically dark atmosphere surrounding MiFID II continues with news that fund managers may be liable for £40 million in tax a year as of January 2018, due to the unbundling of research.

This unbundling means that the research is subject to VAT, something that those in financial services aren’t having to deal with currently whilst research is ‘bundled’.
This news comes after last month’s update that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) were consulting about how MiFID II will affect tax caused by investment research. You can read more about this matter, and indeed the ongoing implications of the directive, on Citywire Wealth Manager.

Reports

A global study into everything ETFs has come courtesy of financial services powerhouse EY for the past 4 years, and now in its fifth year, the industry has been breaking asset management records, reaching a total of $4.4 trillion in AUM as of September, an average growth rate of 21% since 2005. You can download EY’s report here.

It’s a fairly compressed effort, so nothing too long-winded, and instead the writers cram in heaps of information pertaining to the results of their study into ETF usage and predictions for the future. Backed up by the EY colour-scheme heavy line, bar and pie charts, their writings give great insights into what the investment industry can expect from the next three years, and the designers have kept the whole report visually appealing with high-quality photographs.

This study is a useful resource to keep as the industry watches the continual growth and popularity of ETFs within the asset management sector.

Industry Insights

More on ETFs
Speaking of which, the ETF train keeps on rolling, and shows no sign of stopping. Not here at AMMF anyway.

Citywire have delved straight into the 2018 predictions game, and hereby make 4 BIG forecasts for the ETF industry, focusing on the increased want for more socially aware ESG funds, the continual expansion into exchange-traded funds from providers (particularly in the US), the rise of smart beta and – hip hip hooray! – how MiFID II will drive investors towards low-cost portfolio building blocks.

Take a read here, and expect plenty more ‘2018 look-ahead’ articles to come in the next few weeks.

Finance Monthly Recap
As we reach the end of November, we await Finance Monthly’s new edition for all the latest fintech news, the implications of recent events on the finance world, and fund and investment gossip.

Before then however, here’s the edition from last month in a convenient web-based format. If you want to know exactly what comprises the October issue, I’ll quit talking and leave it to Finance Monthly’s editor Katina Hristova to deliver her top picks:

Take a look at the editor’s picks of our October edition.

Read the full magazine here: https://t.co/AbYrRh2ncb pic.twitter.com/nJWG4C1Ed9
— Finance Monthly (@Finance_Monthly) November 13, 2017

Academia
This is something a little different, courtesy of Eugene F. Fama at the Chicago Booth Review.

The “father of efficient markets” gives some snippets of advice on the pros of passive management (including a fairly hefty critique on active management), portfolio construction and more, also weighing in on the role of robo-advisors and providing some sound levels of applied financial theory.

It all sounds quite heavyweight, but these points are (rather unusually) all separated into text boxes of differing size, making all of Eugene’s salient points easy to digest. The titles also help to pick and choose exactly what you want to read, although we’d advise reading all of it.

And finally…

…can financial marketing be funny?
The Financial Brand takes a look into humour in marketing, where (often) humour can get thrown back into a marketer’s face by a less-than-amused target audience. Whilst brand awareness and character can be boosted from a successful and entertaining campaign, it has to be done right, and this informative article benefits from heavy research to discover a lot about consumer behaviour, as well as which ‘funny’ ad campaigns of the past were actually funny. I should probably take another read…

In a final piece of bewildering investment news, private equity firm Neo Investment Partners has reportedly invested £30 million into Victoria Beckham’s fashion line. Even amongst the wealth of investment opportunities can include real estate, technology and cryptocurrencies, the world has got to stay chic. Clothing, particular that of fashionista Victoria Beckham, is a popular commodity (and we all need to dress, right?), but it’s always fun to see investments in a space we haven’t covered much of here.

That’s all for this week, but be sure to check back soon for more asset management marketing highlights and fintech snippets from Kurtosys.