Octopus

Risk profiling revolution for Octopus Portfolio Manager investors and Distribution Technology users

12 August 2010

Octopus has signed an agreement with Distribution Technology (‘DT’), the UK’s leading provider of financial planning, sales and servicing software, to map its ten investment profiles within its Octopus Portfolio Manager solution onto DT’s popular risk categories.

The investment parameters of the Octopus range of investment portfolios have been independently mapped by DT against Dynamic Planner’s risk categories from category 1 (low risk) to 10 (higher risk). Dynamic Planner® is the UK’s most widely used financial and investment planning tool, with over 30,000 registered adviser users via leading insurers, platforms, advisers, networks and service providers.

The agreement allows advisers who currently use DT’s Dynamic Planner risk profiling tool to seamlessly map their clients’ profiles onto Octopus’ innovative discretionary management solution, Octopus Portfolio Manager, and therefore to access the functionality and performance of the solution. Octopus has been working on the agreement in response to feedback from advisers who voiced the need for a streamlined risk profiling process.

Octopus Portfolio Manager is a low cost, high specification, discretionary managed portfolio service, with no minimum investment, that’s available exclusively through financial advisers.

Guy Myles, Managing Director and co-founder of Octopus Investments, said, “Working in
partnership with advisers on a daily basis, it is clear to us that risk-controlled investments are becoming ever more popular. Advisers require a heightened level of assurance from their providers and investors are demanding reliability and transparency in these processes. As Octopus Portfolio Manager grows its funds under management, we are receiving more enquiries from other platforms, key national and network firms and thus determining how the OPM investment profiles align to the categories used in Dynamic Planner makes perfect sense.”

Ben Goss, CEO of Distribution Technology, added, “High quality client risk profiling is increasingly widespread amongst advisers and we are at the forefront of this development with Dynamic Planner®. Mapping the selected risk profile to funds with a suitable long term asset allocation is a great benefit to advisers. We are pleased to be helping Octopus in their drive to assist advisers in selecting appropriate risk-rated portfolio solutions for their customers.”

Matthew Timmins, Managing Director of Simply Biz, one of the largest IFA networks in the UK, commented, “As we use Distribution Technology’s market-leading long term strategic asset allocation model for the risk-rated funds Simply Biz promotes, it is encouraging to see other well respected Investment Managers such as Octopus adopt a similar approach. We have been working with Octopus for a long time now and find them to be an extremely forward thinking business. This move further demonstrates their desire to work closer with IFAs.”

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Risk profiling revolution for Octopus Portfolio Manager investors and Distribution Technology users