Now that Oakville, Ont.-based Manulife Securities has officially launched its new discretionary management platform, the firm expects it to grow steadily over the next several years as it attracts more financial advisors and their clients.
“We believe that this [business] has the potential to become transformational over time for our organization,” says George Garner, head of national sales with Manulife Securities, projecting growth for the business over the next decade.
The platform, which launched earlier this autumn, will allow the firm to tap into the attractive but increasingly competitive discretionary management business segment, one that has grown by $100 billion in assets under management over the past eight years, he says.
“It’s a rapidly growing asset class, and the growth is accelerating,” Garner says. “There are more and more firms developing this capability, and there are more and more consumers looking to move into this kind of relationship.”
The platform allows advisors to increase efficiencies in their business operations, and manage client relationships more effectively, Garner says.
So far, about 10 of the firm’s advisors have migrated their businesses onto the platform, which the firm calls its Advisor-Managed Program. The expectation is that number will double by the end of December, Garner says, and will continue to grow in 2017.
“We would expect that assets will move onto the platform in a fairly significant fashion,” says Garner, adding that there’s a “tremendous amount of interest — a lot of pent-up interest — in our organization [for the new platform.]”
At the same time, Manulife Securities will take a careful and measured approach to allowing advisors to migrate business on to the new platform, Garner says.
“We want to see very disciplined, credible, hard-working advisors who embrace the rigour and accountability that comes along with managing money in a discretionary fashion,” Garner says. “So, we’re going to proceed carefully, but it is our belief that this will become one of our core offerings.”
Manulife Securities has a developed a rigorous application process, factoring in areas such as professional experience, business profile, portfolio management, and compliance. Advisors hoping to migrate their businesses on to the platform will need a minimum of three years as registered representatives with the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada and meet all associated accreditation requirements.
Garner believes that the new platform will be attractive to advisors outside of the firm, as well, particularly as it grows and becomes better known.
“We’re certainly interested in adding very high quality advisors to our platform,” Garner says, “The development of the advisor managed program opens up another sub-set of advisors in the Canadian landscape that could consider us an option should they be looking to make a change.”
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