Investment restrictions are commonplace, and we see these present throughout a good majority of our portfolios under our review.

From the growing popularity of impact investing, ESG overlays and ever-evolving tax legislation, we have observed a notable increase on mandated investment restrictions. This puts greater responsibility on the Trustee to ensure the portfolio composition adheres to these measures; a breach in these restrictions can be costly.

For instance, recent developments with French taxation has led to several requests from our clients to help identify which of their portfolios hold French situs assets. Without the technology we have built to carry out this function, it would be an onerous and expensive task for our clients to manually check their entire investment book, not to mention the possibility for human error in overlooking the presence of a restricted asset.

Within our new reporting platform (Mosaic 2.0), we can automatically identify specific portfolio restrictions, such as French situs assets, via the receipt of holdings level data from the investment manager. Our platform allows us to set specific restrictions at both a companywide and entity level. Considering the above example, we are able to simply set a restriction within our software and easily identify any position with a French domiciled identifier code. This process is quick, cost effective, and is included in our fixed E-Map reporting fee. Multiple restrictions can be applied to a portfolio for automated identification within our system and can include things such as stock concentration, currency exposure, industry sectors, specific instruments and more.

We welcome the opportunity to speak with all of our clients to better understand any restrictions they wish to put in place. Each restriction added for our clients will also appear in our new client portal, which is due to be officially launched at the end of March 2021.

Here's a sneak peek of how the investment restrictions dashboard will look on the Client Portal:

Our goal for this year, and beyond, is to improve the quality of data flow from the investment managers to our system, bringing further benefit to our clients. Through the launch of the client portal and the evolving technological advances in our proprietary software, the new system has been designed to automate a plethora of tasks to take the burden away from our clients and provide peace of mind through technology.