Q & A Session with the CEO

For many advisers and clients, the main benefit of smoothing is not having to time investment decisions. There’s nothing more disconcerting, especially for clients with limited investment experience, than seeing the value of their investment fall, even marginally, the day after they have made an investment.

To use a much-overused phrase of recent times we flatten the curve of the ups and downs of investment return.

We understand entirely that first and foremost anyone who invests with Healthy Investment is your client.  

As a mutual we have to send them notification of the Annual General Meeting and they will of course receive an annual bonus statement. On these statutory documents we always recommend that, if they are thinking of making an additional investment, they speak to their adviser. We’ve got lots of examples we’d be happy to share with you so that you understand what you client is likely to receive from us.

Our aim is to build a long term working relationship with financial advisers so we wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise that. If a client comes directly to us following any of our mailings we’ll always let you know.

Our Business Development Executives work closely with our new business and administration team so that they can see any new business coming in from your clients. For us it’s all about working in partnership.

That’s a really good question and unfortunately there isn’t an easy answer as the research departments of many of world’s leading fund managers have found out.

Some ethical investments will perform better than those with no ethical considerations, some won’t. In some years ethical investments will perform better, in some years they won’t.

Direct comparisons between a generalised and ethical approach to investing is difficult because an ethical investment means different things to different people. Healthy Investment excludes investments in companies that could do harm and only invest in companies that can demonstrate responsible business practices. Other investment managers may search for and invest in companies that are particularly involved in new forms of energy and bio-diversity.

Whilst investing in our ISAs or Investment Bonds presents a low to medium risk opportunity, many promoted ethical funds have a much higher risk profile and your clients will appreciate your advice when thinking about the options. Just because it’s ethical doesn’t mean it’s not high risk

We took the rather unusual decision to defer our annual bonus declaration for 2019 until later in the year as we were just about to make the declaration when the coronavirus outbreak caused the financial markets to crash and employees to be locked down.

Our priority was to ensure the safety of our staff and to get home working arrangements in place which have resulted in no disruption to service for members and advisers.

Our second priority, aligned to the PRA and FCAs expectations, was to ensure that we remained financially strong given that some investment analysts were predicting an unprecedented further collapse of investment markets, which thankfully we have not seen.

The Board are continuing to monitor the situation and will lock in the 2019 bonuses when some sense of normality returns to both working practices and investment markets. Personally I’m in favour of making the formal declaration after the September quarter-end but they are arguments for doing it earlier or later. It doesn’t really matter because we’ve ensured that no member is losing out as investors are continuing to receive interim bonus for everyday that their investment is with us.

It’s very frustrating because 2019 was such a good year and we are committed to ensuring a fair return for all our members.

We are often asked why the value of investments are not available on valuation platforms and the simple answer is, they don’t need to be. Unlike unit-linked investments where the price fluctuates every day, the consistent return offered by With-profits investments means that investors will not be seeing large swings in the value of the investments from day to day.

Annual statements are issued to all investors which show the value of their investment and the bonuses that have been added. The current bonus rate is published on our website for investors and advisers who want to see how their investment is growing and additional statements and valuations can be requested at any time.