David Tiller

Investing in passive funds has grown in popularity as a low-cost, diverse and reliable means of mirroring the performance of a specific index.

The Funds are managed by the 30-strong Quantitative Investment Strategies (QIS) team, which manages over £81 billion of assets.

Sean Phayre, global head of quantitative investing, said: “We have an extensive range of index tracker funds designed to meet a variety of client objectives. We are increasingly experiencing client demand to make use of the latest advances in passive and wider quantitative investing. Both areas play key roles in efficient portfolio construction and risk management.”

The new fund share classes are exclusively available on the Standard Life Wrap and Elevate platforms.

David Tiller, head of UK propositions, said: “Since taking the lead in platform unbundling and ‘superclean’, Standard Life has a track record of actively negotiating with investment managers to secure greater fund choice for advisers using Wrap and Elevate. Today, more advisers are looking for flexibility to make the right active decisions while ‘cost balancing’ their portfolios using an Index Fund allocation. Being able to secure favourable terms for Index Funds means advisers and discretionary managers have more freedom to allocate to the best opportunities for their clients.”

The QIS team weight the Funds according to the market capitalisation of each company or outstanding debt of each company or country in the benchmark index. The process used is scalable, repeatable and risk-controlled.