Watch: Baron & Grant's Tom Poynton on joining the platform and the onboarding process

Or read the transcript here: 

Firstly, tell us a little bit about you and your firm…

I'm Tom Poynton and I'm an executive director at Baron and Grant Investment Management limited. We're a DFM firm with advice permissions and a particular specialism in investment trust focused portfolios. We launched at the start of this year, however, we have extensive experience on the advice and investment management side of the business. My colleague John Baron wrote the Financial Times guide to investment trusts and chief executive of the firm, Chris Grant, has an extensive 20 year city career as an investment analyst. We launched at an interesting time with the business given the pandemic, however, we've onboarded circa 30 million of client assets during the first quarter without having a single client meeting.

What was your business looking for in a platform?

In terms of what we were looking for in a platform, given our investment trust specialism, it was vital to have an in house dealing desk because we needed real access to the market. The majority of others in our space deal in open ended vehicles or package up orders once a day, however, it was critical that we had that real time access to the market. An all in platform fee was also important - it was easy for not only us to understand, but also the clients. And while headline platform fees may often seem inexpensive, when dealing commissions and admin fees are added, often they're not as competitive as they may first appear.

How would you describe your experience of moving to the platform?

I couldn't speak more highly of our experience of moving to the platform, the adoption process has been efficient, coordinated, and communication has been constant. Our point of contact Sarah I speak to on a daily basis. And they're completely in tune with the cases that we are processing. We met every member of the team involved from the head of dealing to the platform inception team. We're also a DFM firm and so we also use the IFDL side of the business and both are very coordinated in their approach. I don't think any other platform would be able to give us the hands on experience that we've received so far. And they've set themselves a high benchmark.

How do you feel now that the onboarding process is complete?

Since authorization we've been in a soft launch phase, and now onboarding is complete, we're confident to open the doors to new money and new clients given the provision of the service from the platform, and they've been critical really in the first quarter and we look forward to strengthening our relationship going forward.

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