Blue Chip Journal Issue 76

COVER FEATURE
Florbela, you joined Momentum Investment Consulting in
January 2017 as the head of Momentum Investment Consulting.
Please describe the path that led you to this point.
I started my career as a consultant in the healthcare space at
Alexander Forbes. I transferred to Investment Solutions after six
years. That’s where I became involved in investments, even though
I was mainly involved with the institutional side of investments.
When I worked for the group previously (for the division that is now
Momentum Global Investment Management, but was then RMB
International Multi-Managers), I got my first insight into retail investments.
So I guess that’s the start of the path that led me to this point.
What are the defining highlights of
your career? One would have to be
the year that the institutional team
at Investment Solutions brought in
R10-billion in assets. There is no better
feeling than knowing that a client has
seen the value that your team can
add. Securing a client and then jointly
growing assets with them would be a
career highlight for me regardless of
where I have worked over the years. Also,
heading up various new business teams
and being involved in partnership JVs
with advisors would be other highlights.
What do you deem to be the most critical component to
financial success? I believe that the best place to start in securing
your personal financial success is to appoint a financial advisor and
together go through a budget exercise to determine your short-,
medium- and long-term financial goals. Once this is clear, it’s easy
to evaluate the different investment options likely to get you to
those goals. Without a plan or goal, it’s difficult to measure how
successful or unsuccessful you have been.
Advisors should remain
objective and not allow
their subjectivity or
own personal views on
markets, the economy
or the virus to drive
the formulating and
planning process.
MOMENTUM INVESTMENT CONSULTING
Momentum Investment Consulting (MIC) was
launched in 2008 to minimise the pressures of
determining asset allocation and fund choices
for client portfolios – and today MIC manages
assets in excess of R7 billion. What do you
attribute this success to? Our understanding
of the financial advice process is one of our key
strengths. Our team is made up of CFA charter
holders, actuaries and certified financial planners,
allowing us to consider the various effects of
decisions taken in managing client portfolios.
We are a client-centric business. Our clients
often cite our regular communication, transparent
and detailed reporting, and flexibility in the
execution of our investment skill, as the things
that they value most.
What is the baseline factor the makes MIC’s financial services
and products so popular? I think our outcome-based investing
(OBI) philosophy works well in an advice-led investment world. It
makes it easy for us to construct portfolios that are closely aligned
to clients’ own investment goals over their investment terms.
Please outline areas of growth in the past two years. We have
segmented the retail clients into different markets, allowing us
to price appropriately and competitively regardless of client size.
The evolution in the advice market and the expected effect that
legislation such as the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) will have
on advisors has resulted in us develop-
ing a more flexible offering so that both
Category I and Category II advisors have
more choice in the services that they can
get from us.
In what areas do you see the company
expanding in the short term?
Although the majority of our advisors
have historically wanted to be involved
in all aspects of building solutions for
their clients, this year we have seen a
trend towards outsourcing the full asset
management service to us.
We are also seeing an increase in
appetite from other Category II licensed
advisors and advisor networks wanting to partner with us to
enhance their existing offering. I suspect this is where the majority
of the growth will come from once RDR comes into effect.
As a result of these trends, we have accordingly restructured
our team to ensure specialisation. We need to remain scalable
and flexible. The biggest focus has been on the automation of
our processes and the development of more tools to enhance the
value for our clients.
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