Tearing down the barriers for professional money managers

Specializing in products for family offices, pension funds, financial intermediaries and other professional investors, the Swiss-based advisory and execution firm Bonart Financial Performance Ltd. constructs bespoke investment vehicles to fit each client’s individual requirements, investment strategy and risk-return profile. 
 

Freedom of choice 

The firm operates an open ecosystem where investors can freely source investment products from a wide range of global funds and alternative investments. CEO and Executive Chairman Boaz Barack explains how Bonart’s offering works: “Clients have the option of selecting from our broad range of pre-defined off-the-peg investment strategies. We currently offer around 50 of those, including thematic offerings such as technology, sustainability or demographics. Or if they prefer, they’re free to construct a completely new product tailored according to their personal preferences and populate it with any combination of elements they want, from funds, securities or real estate to collectables. Whatever they choose, we provide the means for them to white label the resulting product and sell it as their own”.

This is where GenTwo’s specialized technology and expertise come in. Barack: “We turn to GenTwo to provide us with the wrapper for these products in the form of an Actively Managed Certificate (AMC). Our asset manager clients are subsequently able to ‘fractionalize’ the overall asset they have created by selling portions of the AMC on to investors”.

Cost-effective access to premium products and services

A boutique operation focused on a specific clientele, Bonart succeeds in punching above its weight in the industry by virtue of the cooperation agreements it has signed with many of the leading names in the asset management industry - such as Partners Group, Stepstone, Hamilton Lane and many other world-class Fund Managers. These not only give the firm access to a broad range of top-quality management capabilities and premium content to include in its offering, but bring its clients other benefits too: “Under the agreements, the firms we work with undertake to impose considerably lower minimum ticket requirements and commissions than major industry players would normally demand,“ Barack emphasizes. “The costs associated with our service are therefore significantly lower than those involved in constructing a portfolio independently”. 

Bonart’s innovative model also offers asset managers the opportunity to increase the market exposure of their own-brand funds even if they are relatively small and not widely known. This “piggybacking” effect is achieved by creating a wrapper which contains primarily big-name funds but also the client’s own product. The involvement of major industry players makes the overall wrapper very attractive to investors, while the smaller fund benefits from the resulting stronger sales. 

Even when a client creates a white label product and sells it under their own name or brand, Bonart retains the underlying management, says Barack. “We undertake to handle the administration of the resulting product on our clients’ behalf, thus freeing them from the duties and headaches of day-to-day portfolio management. Full responsibility for compliance, lifecycle management, rebalancing and reporting remains with us”.
 

Stringent quality control at every step

When deciding what portfolio structure would be best suited to implementing their strategy, clients can call on the expertise and advice of Bonart’s Investment and Advisory Board of experts from international finance and academia. The Investment Committee is also charged with ensuring seamless and rigorous quality control at every step of the investment process by constantly monitoring and if necessary fine-tuning the portfolio architecture.  
 

“An in-depth analysis of each client’s objectives, preferences, limitations and risk appetite helps us guide clients to precisely the right solution for their particular needs”, says Barack. “The entire analysis and selection process is backed up by Bonart’s sophisticated in-house software, which examines each individual element of a portfolio in terms of historical performance, suitability for the overall strategy and potential impact in combination with the other component assets”.
 

Tradable and investible for anyone

Regardless of whose branding they carry, he says, all Bonart products are registered on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX) with an International Securities Identification Number (ISIN), making them tradable and investible for anyone around the globe.  
 

Barack is proud of the fact that Bonart’s proprietary and white label products have historically performed strongly even in times of considerable market volatility. For asset managers and distributors, he declares, they offer a convenient way to diversify into innovative products, reliable sources of income and recurring revenues while eliminating unnecessary complexity and cost.
 

Bonart entrusts GenTwo and its state-of-the art technology and peerless industry network with creating the wrappers for its tailored products. Says Barack: “GenTwo is a pioneer when it comes to releasing the dormant monetary worth in what have historically been hard-to-realize assets. We know we can rely on them to wrap a whole range of sources of value – some of them previously inaccessible to many investors - into a standard financial product that can be offered to any investor. And experience tells us that they’ll always do that quickly, simply and at attractive rates”.