What is the Wesleyan With Profits Growth Fund?
The aim of the Wesleyan With Profits Growth Fund is to provide capital growth over the medium to long term by investing in UK and international equities, bonds, property, cash and other related investments.
Alongside this, the fund aims to avoid sharp rises and falls by ‘smoothing’ returns over the period of the plan.
Our flagship fund for a reason
Designed to make investing smoother for your clients, there are many benefits to investing in the Wesleyan With Profits Growth Fund:
- Available via independent platforms - Wealthtime and Nucleus - providing ease of access and the ability to incorporate into client portfolios
- Smoothed returns to mitigate day-to-day market volatility
- Daily pricing, daily smoothing, daily trading
- No unit price adjustments, no market value reductions (MVRs)
- Actively managed diversified fund invested in a wide range of asset classes
- Built for medium to long-term investments (five years or more)
- Run by an award-winning Investments team
- A robust and repeatable sustainable approach to investing
- Risk profiled: Defaqto and Dynamic Planner risk rating 5 and Synaptic ‘balanced’ rating
- Low volatility, as shown by an FE Fundinfo risk score of 10 (as at 30th September 2023)
- Regulated under IDD (Insurance Distribution Directive), meaning the Financial Services Compensation Scheme applies, as it would to insured funds.
The value of investments and any income can go down as well as up. Investors may get back less than they invest.
Smoother returns
A smoothed pricing process lies at the heart of Wesleyan’s With Profits Growth Fund, offering a simple, easy to understand fund structure that seeks to reduce sharp rises and falls in value. The fund offers the benefits of daily pricing, daily trading and daily smoothing. In addition, there are no market value reductions (MVRs), further minimising price surprises.
To reduce short-term fluctuations in the value of a client’s investment, the full amount of the investment returns, and other profits and losses, are not passed on as they arise. Instead, we apply any changes to the value of the investment steadily over time. In periods of good investment returns, we may keep back some of the return. This is then gradually applied to the investment and can be used to cushion the fall in periods of poorer investment returns.
More reasons to choose the Wesleyan With Profits Growth Fund...
The Wesleyan With Profits Growth Fund is managed with a long-term, contra-cyclical investment approach, and maintains diverse portfolios across a range of asset classes to manage risk. This includes UK and international equities, bonds, property, cash and other related investments.
By making sure that the fund is diversified across and within asset classes, the portfolio meets the needs of its ‘moderate-risk’ rating while also maximising the likelihood of achieving long-term returns for investors, which is what the fund has been designed to deliver.
Wesleyan's financial strength underpins our focus on delivering competitive and smooth investment returns over the longer term.
At 373%* our solvency ratio is strong. This means that we are assessed as having enough capital to meet our investors’ needs, even in the most severe of circumstances. As a mutual with no shareholders, we can control the amount of reserves we hold (£466m), directly impacting our financial strength.
This strength allows us at times to distribute some of our reserves to our With Profits fundholders. When this happens, investors in the With Profits Growth Fund will get a share of this.
*This figure is based on Wesleyan's own internal risk and solvency assessment and forms part of a private submission to the regulator each year; it is much higher than the publicly reported minimum capital value.
At Wesleyan, sustainability is an integral part of who we are, because doing the right thing for our investors, employees and communities is part of our DNA.
We proactively seek opportunities to be a positive force for change in a number of key areas of sustainability. Sustainability is a journey for Wesleyan, with short, medium, and longer-term activity in place to meet our aims. Clients’ money is invested in assets that align with our Sustainable Investing Policy and its three key pillars; that seek to reduce harm and have a positive impact on the environment and social development, while also driving change.
Our Investments team was named ‘Responsible Investor of the Year’ by the Insurance Asset Risk Awards 2022 and we are a signatory of the Principles for Responsible Investment.
Meet our award-winning Investments team
Our With Profits Fund is managed by our in-house, award-winning Investments team - consisting of Fund Managers, Property Managers, Analysts, a Sustainable Investment (SI) Team and support staff. With over 150 years of combined experience between them, our team continuously strives to outperform the markets.
The team manages a range of funds, including unit trust funds and the With Profits Fund, which have a combined value of circa £7.2bn (as at 31st December 2022). They’ve won multiple industry awards, including Responsible Investor of the Year at the Insurance Asset Risk Awards 2022 and, most recently, Investment Team of the Year in 2023.
Meet two of the team below...