Platform providers have been forced to hire new staff, create new systems and remove products from investment menus in response to the suspension of redemptions on a variety of managed funds.
Westpac’s wealth management arm, BT Financial Group (BTFG), added nearly 20 employees to deal with redemption requests and hardship claims coming from financial advisers, Asgard & Advance national manager for product Kelly Power said.
Asgard & Advance is a BTFG member.
The BT Wrap and Asgard eWrap platforms have 76 suspended products, affecting $4.7 billion in funds under management and 200,000 investors.
“After mortgage funds froze, we had product people running around in a frenzy trying to work out how we’re going to put processes in place to deal with suspended assets and client queries,” Power said.
“So we hired a whole dedicated team to manage this problem and all up it was an investment of around $2 million from our business to make sure we can manage these assets.”
Many mortgage and property funds froze withdrawals following the introduction of the federal government’s guarantee on bank deposits in October 2008.
Power said Asgard created a new online tracking system where an adviser could put in redemption requests that could automatically carry forward into future redemption windows.
Oasis Asset Management managing director Wayne Lowe said the platform provider had established a working group of 12 people to deal with financial advisers’ and their investors’ queries on frozen and impaired funds.
“Our investment committee has also worked closely with our frozen fund and impaired fund committee to identify funds that we deemed at high risk of becoming impaired and if need be, in consultation with dealers, we took them off the investment menu for future investment,” Lowe said.
The Oasis platform has close to 10 per cent of its funds under administration frozen or impaired.
IOOF Group had taken initiatives including making representations to fund managers for hardship relief on behalf of clients of financial planners, IOOF head of product and marketing Nick Everingham said.
