As we live longer, planning for 100-year lifetimes could become crucial in helping to secure financial wellbeing in a world worth living in. We recognise that everyone’s financial journey is different, that is why our approach to financial and investment planning is based on individual goals.

To understand these goals and help provide peace of mind throughout your life we work with you in three phases:

PLAN: A clear plan is key in helping you meet your longer-term goals e.g. a comfortable retirement.

DESIGN: Designing an investment portfolio that considers your time horizon, your attitude to risk and your capacity for risk.

REVIEW: Helping you stay on track towards reaching your goals through changing market and personal conditions.

St. James's Place Wealth Management recognises that no single investment house has a monopoly on investment expertise, and St. James's Place do not employ in-house investment managers. Instead we carefully select a number of external managers of outstanding ability to manage our range of funds.

This has a number of advantages:

• It gives us the freedom to select first-class managers from the global investment market to manage our funds on behalf of our clients
• It enables us to change any of these managers at short notice if we have lost confidence in them, without any charges, or tax, or inconvenience to our clients
• It offers our clients a real opportunity to diversify their investments by spreading their money across funds managed by different managers with different styles

The value of an investment with St. James's Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds you select and the value can therefore go down as well as up. You may get back less than you invested.

The cornerstone of the St. James's Place approach is our Investment Committee, which ‘manages the fund managers’ on behalf of our clients. The role of the Investment Committee is to:

• Select the best investment managers
• Continually monitor those managers to ensure they maintain the standards for which they were selected
• Change managers if this becomes necessary
• Ensure clients have an appropriate spread of investments by providing a comprehensive range of funds and Growth and Income Portfolios

We believe our investment process provides our clients with the best chance to achieve superior returns over the medium to long term.

To help in carrying out its role, the St. James's Place Investment Committee is assisted by our in-house team of analysts and independent consultants, each selected for their expertise in particular areas of the investment world. Our analysts and independent consultants play a vital role in the selection and monitoring of the fund managers, as well as assisting the Investment Committee with investment strategy and the development of our fund range.

The value of an investment with St. James's Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds you select and the value can therefore go down as well as up. You may get back less than you invested.

Finding and monitoring the best investment talent requires specialist knowledge, detailed analysis and a lot of legwork. So, to help in carrying out its role, the St. James's Place Management Team is assisted by a number of independent investment consultancy firms. The consultants’ independence ensures that they can operate with complete objectivity when fulfilling their research and monitoring role.

In the same way as the fund managers, each of the consultants is engaged on the strength of their skills in particular areas of the investment world.

Access to this kind of expertise is not normally available to individual clients; this is another example of the rigorous and distinctive process that helps reassure our clients that their money is in good hands.

Our investment consultants play a vital role in the selection and monitoring of the fund managers, as well as assisting the Investment Management Team with investment strategy and the development of our fund range. This forms a part of our plan, design, review process, helping our Partners design best-in-class investment solutions that align with their clients’ long-term goals.

These investment consultants include:

• Redington: Redington has grown to a team of 196 individuals, including 111 investment professionals, and has a combined total of over 400 years’ investment consulting, actuarial, capital markets and asset management experience.
• Rocaton: It has broad experience of consulting over 80 investment firms and gives us access to a fund manager research platform with impressive scale.
• bifinance: Established in 1999, bfinance has worked for more than 380 institutional clients across 38 countries, operating out of nine international offices. The firm has been recognised with numerous industry awards for innovation and investment consultancy.
• MICAP: Founded in 2013 and specialising in the alternatives market, MICAP provides us with high-quality independent due diligence, research tools and panel support services on the tax-advantaged investment space.
• MJ Hudson Allenbridge: Founded in 1984, MJ Hudson Allenbridge’s team has grown to 125 professionals working throughout Europe and advising more than £700 billion of assets.
• Ortec Finance: The firm now services 500+ clients, across seven global locations, with combined assets in excess of €3 trillion euros. It provides us with advisory and monitoring services for the effective construction of our diverse Portfolio offerings.
• eVestment: Founded in 2000, eVestment offers a range of subscription cloud-based services for institutional investors and consultants.
• Inalytics: Founded in 1998, over the past 20 years Inalytics has analysed over $7tn of assets on more than 150 million investment decisions.

When you invest your money with St. James's Place you can make that money a real force for good. Hear from our Investment Director, Robert Gardner, introduce our approach to responsible investing.

We know that many of our clients want their money invested responsibly, even if preserving and growing capital, or generating income, might be their primary aims. We take this priority seriously, not least through integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into our investment process.

Our journey so far

We recognise that responsible investment is a journey, not a destination - there is plenty of work still to do. That said, we are proud of our achievements so far. 

We continually develop our responsible investment approach, working closely with our managers to encourage and support the considerations around responsible investing as an integrated part of the investment process.

While the principles of Responsible Investing are embedded throughout our investment approach, some of our solutions place an extra emphasis on ESG factors. For example, the Sustainable & Responsible Equity fund provides a focused solution for investors seeking a strategy that contributes to a more sustainable global economy.

We believe that our external fund managers should factor environmental, social and governance issues into their investment decisions. This focus provides not only a risk management tool, but also an alternative lens to identify new opportunities that may contribute to superior long-term investment returns. 

More information

Read about the progress we made in 2020 around our approach to Responsible Investing.

St. James's Place is a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investing (UNPRI). View further information and see how our Portfolios are managed in accordance with the UNPRI.

St. James's Place is a signatory to the UK Stewardship Code and is fully supportive of its principles. Read our statement of commitment to the code.