Make the most of your money
Fowler Drew integrates Chartered Financial Planning with institutional investment techniques to deliver fully-bespoke, holistic, wealth management at lower cost than our competitors
Fowler Drew is unique in applying to private wealth management the institutional techniques of Asset/Liability Modelling to customise goal-based portfolios with client-defined and client-controlled outcomes
What these techniques support is the complete integration of a plan and a portfolio. In conventional wealth management there is no proof of connection, initially and continuously, between someone’s financial plan and the investment portfolio. At Fowler Drew that link is formed by continuous interaction with the same mathematical modelling for both. When we jointly plan, and replan, with a client the best possible balance of resources, risk and outcomes for their goal, we are sharing the outputs from simulations of a particular dynamic portfolio approach. Clients see the link. They make it themselves when doing the planning.
Controlled Outcomes Investing
01
Visualise the future
At Fowler Drew, we focus on outcomes, which for individuals are the equivalent of their ‘liabilities’, as either wants or needs. Rather than investing in the hope of beating some vaguely appropriate benchmark, we invest to deliver defined, client-agreed outcomes. These depend entirely on their goal, or the purpose for the money. And they depend on how they see satisfaction.
02
Plan it
For most clients, who have spending goals, the outcomes sought from their investment portfolios are best expressed as real (after inflation) levels of annual spending. Having worked hard to build capital, our clients want to maximise their enjoyment of it, either by spending or using it to help members of the family. Annual spending amounts, not finance jargon, are what people can relate to. This in turn means they, not their advisers, control the planning.
03
Make it happen
Like its institutional equivalent, every Fowler Drew goal-based portfolio is uniquely customised, because the time horizons, and the tolerable and desired outcomes at every horizon, are unique. You control the variables that will determine outcomes. You do so using information about probable outcomes, in the form of outputs of a model. Guided by us, you interact with the model at every stage in the life of the goal-based plan, not just at an initial planning stage.
Experience the outcomes-driven difference
Test drive our planning engine for a spending goal
It will help you identify the unique combination of resources, risk, dates and spending outcomes that would provide most satisfaction.
We do it all
Risk management and efficient use of money are not just about investment, and we are not just a portfolio manager. Where not in our own scope, such as mortgages and currency, we refer to selected specialists. The scope of our wealth management service includes:
Goal-based planning
In goal-based management, every investment solution relies on holistic, lifetime financial planning.
Outcomes-driven portfolios
Outcomes-driven investing customises every portfolio to its own purpose and its one or many time horizons.
Spending goals
Spending is most people’s dominant financial goal and ‘drawdown’ is the new standard for planning it.
Next-generation money
In a goal-based approach, gifting and bequest capital is identified by first planning the spending goal.
Charitable trusts
Trustees’ access to modelling ensures objectives and trade-offs are clear and explicit.
Insurance
A holistic view of how risk for an individual or household is managed.
Tax advice
For most clients, maximising outcomes means maximising after-tax outcomes.
Pensions
Funding retirement spending is typically a goal that competes for resources with other goals.
How the service works
The Fowler Drew wealth management service has fully integrated elements only available as a single service: initial financial planning, initial setting up of investment accounts on a platform and arranging any protection needs, continuous portfolio review and rebalancing and new financial planning. Follow the link to see a summary of:
- Contractual basis
- Service scope
- Delivery timeline
- Fee charging points
How you can benefit
Evidence of the benefits of the Fowler Drew differences is provided by an exceptional 99% client retention rate.
Independent surveying suggests the attributes most commonly valued by Fowler Drew clients are peace of mind and ease of decision making.
Testimonials link these attributes directly to the framework of a goal structure and to the interaction with game-based modelling. Modelling informs decisions for each goal; the use of probabilities provides comfort that plans have been rigorously stress-tested; and game playing makes the concept of risk tolerance more intuitive and less abstract.
With engagement in continuous collaborative planning comes ownership and motivation – the missing ingredients in most delegated relationships that rely on the ‘factory’ model of standard portfolios.
Clients prize a value proposition that delivers these benefits at a fairer, flatter and entirely transparent fee. The use of index-tracking vehicles to implement the goal-based portfolio asset allocation ensures all-in costs (advice, products, custody, transactions) are minimised.
Videos
Stuart Fowler explains Pension Freedoms
How to assess the value of your Wealth Manager
News & Updates
Investing to secure defined outcomes
Final-salary pension transfers tell us a lot about the wider need for customised investment solutions, goal-based and outcomes-driven, to replace standardised portfolio types. Failure of conventional solutions Defined Benefit (DB) transfers, where a known, secure real...
Back to the old normal: the Fowler Drew model in a post-QE world
Clients tend to view the value of the proprietary Fowler Drew modelling as a function of the stage they are at in life, rather than whether the economic or capital-market context is one that makes decisions easier or harder. As model builders, we know that the context...
Managing risk with risk-free assets
Bonds, supposedly the risk-reducing asset in conventional portfolio management, have suffered large losses this year. It is clearer than ever that the retail investment industry needs a new approach to managing risk. In this article we explain how Fowler Drew uses...
Calculating DB transfer redress
The FCA has consulted (CP22/15) on its detailed proposals for calculating consumer redress in cases where BSPS advice was found to be unsuitable, whether by FOS itself or independent assessors approved by the FCA. This follows an earlier consultation (CP22/6), still...
Picking the picker who picks the stockpicker
How do you explain to private clients that picking active fund managers in equity markets, or picking advisers who do, is a near-certain route to wealth destruction? Just show how many things have to go right for the extra costs and risks to be rewarded with a better...
Fowler Drew differs from typical investment firms who seek ‘alpha’ for alpha’s sake, instead harvesting low-cost ‘beta’, building towards target outcomes that clients get to define. Their assumptions about how markets behave seem sensible and plausible to this non-expert client. The focus on outcomes helps us to understand what we are doing and why. It’s self-contained, neat and tidy and very suitable for busy lives.