Manager Research

Stanlib Asset Management (Stanlib) recently announced that it had partnered with JP Morgan Asset Management (JPMAM) as its new offshore partner. JPMAM is set to provide Stanlib with investment management capabilities to complement the SA manager’s existing offering.

According to Stanlib, they will retain full ownership of the overall investment capabilities and product offerings. In turn, JPMAM will partner with Stanlib to distribute the US-based asset manager’s investment product offering in South Africa.

There is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding how the deal between the two companies will actually work and we are not certain at this stage what Stanlib’s offshore product range will look like.

Stanlib’s current offshore partners include the following:

Our current understanding is that only the Global Fixed Income and Global Cash mandates will transfer from Brandywine and Fidelity to JPMAM, while Columbia Threadneedle will continue to manage the Global Equity and Global Multi-Asset capabilities.

In addition to the above, the local multi-asset funds also use the current global funds processes as inputs into the funds, this includes the Stanlib Balanced Fund which we cover.

Even though Columbia Threadneedle is expected to remain as the manager on the Global Equity and Multi-asset funds we are not sure how the changes will affect the broader Stanlib business and as a result, we have decided to withdraw the ratings on the global funds.

We have not reviewed JPMAM’s fund range and there is still uncertainty related to when the new mandates will come into effect and whether or not new products will be introduced. We are in communication with Stanlib on this and we feel that it is best to withdraw the ratings on these funds until we have more clarity surrounding when the Global Bond fund will be transitioned away from Brandywine and how the Balanced Cautious fund is set to be managed.

This does again raise a business concern for us, and we recently went through a process of rating Stanlib’s local fund range. For all of the funds that we did rate, we assigned Tier 3 ratings which was largely centred around our view on the Stanlib business and the constant changes we have seen to product offerings, teams, investment philosophies and processes over a number of years. In our engagements with them we did raise the fact that we thought a change to their offshore product offering was likely and this has now been confirmed through the partnership with JPMAM.

Below, we provide a summary of our current ratings on the Stanlib fund range.