Confident investors have a great deal to gain even while economic gale force winds are forecast, say the experts at St James’s Place Wealth Management.

“Despite continued market uncertainty there remains a growing demand for advice and we are very well positioned to capitalise on this, thanks to the strength of our services and our recently expanded team of advisers,” says St. James’s Place Chairman Mike Wilson, who recently announced an impressive 23 per cent increase in new business for 2007.

Award-winning St. James’s Place Wealth Management is one of the UK’s leading wealth management specialists, catering for the individual needs of its clients - people with significant capital or large incomes - providing personal, face-to-face wealth management advice from some of the very best financial advisers the industry has to offer. With over 400,000 customers on its books and £18.2 billion worth of funds under management, this FTSE 150 business is highly focused on protecting and growing existing clients‘capital, as well as nurturing new business.

Equally, specially-selected pension, life assurance, and trust and estate-planning products and services, chosen from the market’s best providers, allow St. James’s Place Wealth Management to offer customers ‘best of breed’ in these areas.

In-depth market experience is at the heart of the organisation. Such expertise is requisite because St. James’s Place Wealth Management’s clients tend to present unique, sometimes especially complicated personal situations, to which investment advice needs to be carefully tailored. For St. James’s Place, successful wealth management is about putting clients first and building meaningful, long-term relationships, “recognising that no one client’s objectives or circumstances are the same as another,” explains Wilson.

Each of the organisation’s financial advisors are employed as ‘partners’ in the St. James's Place Partnership, bringing together some of the most highly regarded professionals working in financial services today. With an average of 16 years in the industry, these partners can present the sharpest, smartest, most timely, pertinent investment opportunities to their clients. Their formidable knowledge and skills ensure those all-important client relations can be built firmly on trust.

St. James’s Place Wealth Management has a distinctive approach to wealth management, choosing to painstakingly select a team of external managers to run its range of funds, rather than employ in-house fund managers. To this end, an Investment Committee is in place to ‘manage the fund managers’ on behalf of clients, ensuring fund managers remain highly-focused on their clients’ needs, and diversifying risk for those clients by selecting managers who possess different investment styles.

Recruitment of the right fund managers is of course fundamental to this approach. Hence, independent investment consulting firm, Stamford Associates, is retained by St. James Place Wealth Management to select and manage the fund managers. With a highly specialised background in advising large pension funds on the selection of fund managers, Stamford has proved an invaluable resource.

Behind St. James’s Place Wealth Management’s distinctive investment process is a belief that no single fund management house can possibly have a monopoly on investment expertise. It is certainly a shrewd way of ensuring more agility when responding to ever-changing market conditions, and allows St. James’s to employ who they consider to be the best of the fund manager fraternity for the good of its clients.

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