Standard & Poor’s Fund Services today affirmed its ‘STRONG’ rating to the Aviva Investors Direct Separately Managed Accounts (DSMA) offering.
The rating reflects our conviction that Aviva Investors Australia Ltd. has a strong ability to operate the SMA platform and deliver on its strategic objective of providing a highly cost-competitive SMA model portfolio offering.
DSMA is actually an SMA administration service for separately managed accounts rather than a platform in the conventional sense. It provides retail investors with highly cost-competitive access to the portfolio manager’s model portfolios—Aviva Investors Core Opportunities and Aviva Investors Dividend Builder.
S&P Fund Services analyst Rodney Lay said: “In our view, the service delivers on the manager’s objective and it is convenient for advisers with its direct data feeds into the largest adviser software applications, namely XPLAN, VisiPlan, and COIN.”
The one material change since our previous review is the change in ownership of Aviva Investors Australia, which was acquired by a National Australia Bank (NAB) subsidiary in October 2011. Based on discussions with management, we believe the risk that the service will be discontinued at some future point is extremely remote based on NAB’s early indications of support, the autonomous nature in which the manager is operating post the NAB acquisition, and the service’s strategic fit within NAB.