Standard Life has reported that its discretionary Investment Hub has broken through the £4bn milestone as it celebrates its third anniversary.

The Hub began with seven discretionary managers and now has 76. It unifies the custody of investment assets and tax wrappers, allowing multiple portfolios to be run within and across tax wrappers from a range of discretionary managers, says Standard Life.

David Tiller, Standard Life’s head of adviser and wealth manager propositions, said: “The support for our Wrap discretionary Investment Hub is outstanding, with assets now exceeding some platforms in the market.

“I am convinced that this success is all about advisers and discretionary managers’ focus on the client, with the Hub enabling much closer coordination of Financial Planning and investment activities than was previously possible.

“In order to meet the needs of the new retirement market, advisers are demanding more from their platform. They are looking for fund houses, in-house administrators, and third party discretionary managers to be able to match specific mandates aligned to different client goals and for platforms to enable these to be combined as part of an overall client plan.”

Tony Allan, partner and head of business development at wealth manager LGT Vestra, said: “The Investment Hub is intuitive, easy to use and has clearly been designed with a real understanding of the needs of discretionary managers and advisers.”

Standard Life says the hub offers flexibility with the ability to combine advisory models, discretionary portfolios and multi-asset fund strategies; portfolios run across multiple tax wrappers and multiple portfolios within a single tax wrapper. It also supports retirement income risk-management strategies and enables rebalancing between portfolio strategies as well as within them (de-risking short-term income needs)

The hub offers access to more than 500 portfolio strategies from 76 top discretionary businesses.

Standard Life operates the recently-acquired Elevate platform and Standard Life Wrap platforms which it says are used by over 3,000 financial advice and wealth management firms and serve over 360,000 customers.
Total platform assets under administration are over £47 billion.

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