All your SMA questions, answered

Iress product manager Marc Fraser-Jones recently jumped onto Advisely to answer all your burning questions on Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs) capabilities in Xplan.

Here are four of the most interesting conversations that came out of his AMA: 

Q: Is it difficult to set up an SMA in IPS and WealthSolver? Also, what do investments in reports look like when you have separate investments combined with an SMA under the one platform (wrap account)? Does it show the SMA separately or just list all the investments, including underlying SMA holdings under one list? 

WealthSolver offers SMA investment options for the currently supported platforms. In IPS, the IressNet datafeed from the platform/vendor should handle everything for you. Transactions against holdings within an SMA will be tagged against a Sub Account with an attached SMA investment. Once this data is present, the SMA handling we've built will automatically take place.

SMA fields have been added to the new Beta screens (you may need to enable them in the column chooser). You should be able to group your transactions, holdings, and performance figures by SMA. Below is an example I've put together showing the above for the Position (Beta) screen.

When it comes to reports and data sources, we have had to tread very carefully. As such, it requires a lot of investigation and analysis. The reporting work is still in progress, and more information will be provided as the data sources are released.

However, the functionality should work in a similar way to the new screens, investments that aren't held inside an SMA will show up as direct investments.

Q: Can you please advise the best way to setup an SMA in Wealthsolver? We often have issues with the MER's or AA not flowing in for private labeled managed accounts.

For private SMAs, users can contact our FundData team. FundData can create a shell for the options with fee and AA if a PDS is provided. Users can then use the option in a WealthSolver scenario by adding it via Add Investment or manually adding it to the plan.

If the site's data source is Funddata, the fee and AA will flow through. However, if the site's data source is IPS, users will need to maintain the fee and AA themselves in Portfolio > Maintenance > Products.

Q: Which platforms currently have the SMA at an account level in Xplan functionality? Should it automatically be fed through or does the advice practice need to set the datafeed up a certain way for it to come through? Is there training on XPLAN around this new feature? Which Platforms will have this functionality in Xplan in the near future?

There should be no need to set the datafeed up in a certain way, as long as the data is provided by the platform/vendor to IressNet, with the SMA details, it should flow through into the site without any user intervention. You may need to enable the SMA fields via the column chooser in the new Beta screens, once enabled you can use the new fields to group the results on the screen.

The currently support platforms are:

• AMP North
• Macquarie Wrap
• Macquarie Vision
• Netwealth
• BT Panorama
• HUB24
• Fiducian
• IOOF Group
• CFS Custom Solutions
• CFS Edge
• CFS First Choice (Note: In conjunction with CFS we have built vendor specific SMA handling for the CFS First Choice feed, holdings will be unrolled and displayed in underlying constituents while the rest of the SMAs are displayed in rolled-up level.)

Q: What do you find is the most under-utilised feature in relation to Xplan's SMA modelling functionality?

It's still early days for SMA functionality within Xplan, so it's hard to draw solid conclusions around the utilisation of different features at the moment, that said it is something we're keeping track of.

However, I would like to encourage everyone to jump into the new beta portfolio screens and check them out, along with the SMA functionality we've added.

The beta program is a departure from how we've previously delivered functionality to our customers, giving us the ability to gain fast feedback from users during the process to help guide decisions. The more users we get on board using the new screens, the more feedback we can gather and the better our overall solution will be.