AJ Bell launches five low cost multi-asset funds

AJ Bell is introducing a range of five low cost multi-asset funds in its first retail fund launch.

The range of five multi-asset passive funds will be separately risk targeted with cautious, moderately cautious, balanced, moderately adventurous, adventurous profiles on offer, the company said in a statement announcing the launch.

The annual charge (or ongoing charges figure) is capped at 0.5% and AJ Bell is also waiving its platform charge for the new funds until January 2019. The fixed offer launch period opened yesterday and is available for last minute ISA and SIPP subscriptions, the company said.

The funds will be run by AJ Bell’s investment team including Ryan Hughes, head of fund selection and Leon Diamond, head of investments.

This is the first fund launch by AJ Bell which has 140,000 customers and £32bn assets under administration.

Low costs

Andy Bell, chief executive of AJ Bell, said: “Advisers are increasingly turning to passive investment solutions to keep costs low for their clients and many are choosing to outsource investment management to third parties so they can focus on their core financial planning services.

“To meet that demand we have built a range of diversified multi-asset funds and are mapping them to the main risk profiling tools advisers use so they can easily incorporate them into their existing business processes.

“The funds themselves are already very low cost but we have also decided to waive our platform fee until at least January 2019.”

The indicative asset allocations for the funds are shown below. There is a fixed price of £1 during that period before the funds start trading on 18 April 2017. The full portfolios will be disclosed at launch, the company added.