To meet the growing demand for impact investment products, and in partnership with Sustainalytics, a leading ESG research firm, and Veris Wealth Partners, a leading impact investing wealth management firm, Envestnet in October announced a series of new Quantitative Portfolios (QPs) focusing on Climate Change, ESG, and Gender Lens.
Background
Over the last 4 years, the independent adviser (RIA) space has increasingly seen retail investors seeking financial advice and advisers starting to move from large wirehouses to become more independent.
These advisers, looking for a partner to take care of backoffice functions such as record-keeping and account statements or help in managing their clients money, call on the expertise of firms like Envestnet.
It landed data services provider Yodlee in September 2015 for $590 million, a figure so large that analysts don’t expect the company to break-even until 2020.
Strategy
Envestnet calls on this background and what it calls it claims is its deep index-based solution expertise to help manage more than US$1.3B of September 30, 2016. The Impact Quantitative Portfolios will be managed using tax-smart techniques and capabilities to position the impact portfolios for potential “tax alpha” that can add up to 60 basis points of value annually (PMC Quantitative Research Group, “Capital Sigma: The Return on Advice”, May 2016).
In the same month it announced its new Impact portfolios, it earned wealthmanagement.com’s 2016 award in the Sustainable and Responsible Investing (SRI) category.
A public company since 2010, Envestnet (ENV) is a leading provider of technology and web-based investment products to registered investment advisers and institutions in the US and abroad.
