Financial services firm Snowball Group does not intend to cut ties with its existing platform relationships despite selecting Colonial First State Custom Solutions (Colonial) as its portfolio administration partner.
The listed dealer group announced Colonial as its strategic portfolio administration partner yesterday after a lengthy tender process.
"Obviously, it [Colonial] is a prime relationship and there are obviously other platforms out there and we have significant amount of money on those platforms and we're not going to do anything that's not consistent with the consumers' interests," Snowball Group managing director Tony McDonald said.
"I would expect that we would still maintain very good working relationships with other platforms but obviously Colonial and us are working very closely on particularly the enhanced platform which we think will be a key driver of growth in the future."
McDonald said the search for an administration partner was a broad and lengthy process.
"We did a preliminary scope looking at the majors, but we also spent a bit of time looking at the virtual platforms. We've also looked at industry funds because we've worked closely with some of them," he said.
Under the terms of the partnership, Snowball has purchased the revenue rights to the Symetry Portfolio Services (Symetry) platform for around $11 million.
"The driver behind that was very much to ensure two things: to ensure that we were in a good position to work very closely with Symetry on further enhancements. Secondly, the important thing to note there is that Colonial is very much the driver of the IT and will continue to support the platform. That's particularly in the case of existing users of that platform," McDonald said.
"The other driver of all of this is that it makes it entirely consistent with the regulatory intent, because we're the promoter but we can move to trustee status at any time."
He said Snowball and Colonial are working on enhancing Symetry in terms of direct shares, managed discretionary accounts, model portfolios and exchange traded funds.
