Transcription of Finance News Network Interview with Redpoint Investment Management CEO, Tim BathoLelde Smits: Hello I’m Lelde Smits for the Finance News Network and joining me from Redpoint Investment Management is CEO, Tim Batho. Tim welcome to FNN.
Tim Batho: Thank you, it’s great to be here.
Lelde Smits: Could you start by introducing Redpoint Investment Management. When did you start and what’s the size and experience of the team?
Tim Batho: So Redpoint commenced in September 2011 and it brought together nine very seasoned investment professionals, with more than 170 years of experience. And that experience spans four decades, so I’m sure you’d appreciate that covers a large number of market cycles. And the team have been able to deliver good investment solutions and the right outcomes for clients, during that whole entire period of time.
Unlike most investment or boutiques, this wasn’t just a lift out from one organisation. It actually brought together the experience of individuals from many diverse backgrounds, and many different firms. And we actually believe that’s a big strength of our business, because it enables us to utilise that extensive skill set in what we do for clients, which is to produce highly diversified, cost efficient and risk efficient portfolios.
The other thing we have in our favour is that we have National Australia Bank Limited
(ASX:NAB) as a partner. Now NAB is a minority shareholder in the business, but it’s provided the financial security and the money to enable us to build a very robust platform. Which means that we can concentrate day to day on the things that we do best for clients, which is producing investment outcomes.
Lelde Smits: Which asset classes do you specialise in?
Tim Batho: Because of the breadth of experience within the team, we’re able to paint on quite a broad canvas. So we have experience within Australian equities, global equities, listed property and global infrastructure. And we actually have live strategies that invest in all those asset classes already within our business.
Lelde Smits: Up until recently you’ve had an institutional focus, but several of your funds are now available to retail investors. Could you provide a brief overview?
Tim Batho: The experience of the team has traditionally been to provide investment solutions to institutional clients. And as a relatively new business, that was a natural place for us to start and we’ve been very successful then, starting to build the assets we have under management. Butin the association with NAB, has offered us that opportunity to take the skills that we have applied in the institutional space, and take those to the retail marketplace. And what we’ve noticed is the retail investor is becoming more sophisticated, and understands better how they can use the skills of different asset classes, in building a portfolio. That enables them to build something which actually delivers the outcomes that they want.
And we think we can play a growing and important role in that space. And the skills that we bring around the high diversification and risk efficient, cost effective solutions have equal applicability in the retail space. So we’re happy to bring two new strategies to that space, which we believe will be in the market in the early part of next year. One is a global infrastructure fund and one is an active Australian equity fund.
Lelde Smits: There’s a lot of interest in global infrastructure at the moment. What are the potential benefits and what approach have you taken in regards to setting up the infrastructure fund?
Tim Batho: Global infrastructure is in our view, a very diversifying asset class because it has defensive qualities. But it also has the ability to generate income streams, which are important when people are thinking about how they’re going to live their lives, and wanting to ensure that they have a cash flow to meet their day to day expenses. So we think it has a very important role in an investor’s portfolio that complements things like shares and property.
The approach we’ve actually taken to infrastructure is to ensure that we capture the characteristics of that asset class, so we get those diversification benefits. And we’ve done that by first stages to define very closely what we mean by infrastructure, and create a universe of potential assets that meet that criteria. We then ensure that we’re within our portfolio, each of those assets we hold makes a meaningful contribution to it.
And we also remove those assets which we think are those most likely to fail in delivering those characteristics, if the market comes under pressure. And that enables us to build a portfolio which is highly diversified, more than 100 stocks held, which is somewhat different to many of our competitors, which hold much more concentrated portfolios.
Lelde Smits: Finally Tim, what does the following year have in store for Redpoint Investment Management?
Tim Batho: Well actually 2014 has been a great year for Redpoint. We’ve managed to secure a number of institutional investors. And we’ve obviously got the launch of these two new funds for the retail marketplace, which we’re very excited about. 2015 will really be a continuation of that. It’ll be making sure that we can utilise our investment experience and skills, to continue to build investment solutions, which are meaningful for both institutional and retail investors. So you can expect more diversified, cost efficient and risk efficient portfolios.
Lelde Smits: Tim Batho, thank you for the introduction to Redpoint Investment Management.
Tim Batho: Thank you.
Ends
