A 25-minute listen.  

The latest guest in our investment series is Kevin Doran, managing director and CIO at AJ Bell Investments, who talks about the entrepreneurial nature of our community, and why his company is giving away its fund research.  

Having joined AJ Bell in 2017 from a private banking background, Kevin explains to me his experiences with working with intermediaries who he says are “much more entrepreneurial and in touch with their own businesses”.  

With this client base in mind, he sees AJ Bell as one of the few groups to acknowledge that asset management is largely commoditised today.  

“In a post RDR world of attitude to risk questionnaires, most peoples’ asset allocation has coalesced around a quite tight bunch [of solutions] and so cost it what we lead upon,” he explains.  

“We want to be the cost leader in all markets we enter, but ultimately we know that advisers understand their clients better than anyone else.”  

Two upcoming initiatives from AJ Bell are, firstly, an offering called Fundamentals to make all fund research available online free for those signed up to the platform, and secondly to offer fund factsheets in ‘real time’, updated daily.  

“It’s phenomenal that we are sitting here in 2020, with data storage in the petabytes around the world, and DFM’s websites still show factsheets two months out of date,” he remarks.  

“We think at the point of investment you should know exactly what you are investing in to.”