Andrew Bascand and Christian Hawkesby on investment | Harbour Asset Management | Video

Transcript

Last week we heard from Andrew and Christian on how New Zealand has not just survived since the global financial crisis – thanks to learning the lessons set by its own mini-crisis decades earlier, it’s thrived. This week they explain how Harbour Asset Management‘s expertise, transparency and innovation have won it great success: both in financial returns, and client relations.

World Finance: We’ve already heard about New Zealand and it’s ongoing success story, how does Harbour help investors access New Zealand’s opportunities?

Andrew Bascand: Harbour Asset Management is a leading funds manager in the New Zealand market. We’ve got around forty large institutional clients who have trusted their money with us. The reason they’ve done that is because of our expertise, our experience, and more importantly the transparency with respect to our investments processes. We’ve been doing this for a long time now, so people, when they’re giving us their money, understand quite clearly how we’re going to invest those funds, and they know that we really understand our investment markets.

World Finance: You mentioned expertise there, Christian, you both have impressive resumes, tell us about the experience of your team.

Portfolio managers at Harbour have had around 20 years of experience

Christian Hawkesby: That’s right, Andrew and I both have central banking and markets backgrounds, and more generally within the team our portfolio managers at Harbour have had around 20 years of experience, and the analysts have had in excess of 15 years of experience. We’ve all had international experience through time, both here in London and elsewhere, and really at Harbour what we’re about is taking global best practice and applying it in the local market, the market we know best.

World Finance: And what else makes your offering unique?

Christian Hawkesby: Well I think there’s an element of the experience of the team, not only individually but collectively, in the way that we work together. Secondly, that long track record as a team has enabled us to enhance and build our investment processes, and really that comes through in the performance and the way that’s translated through time. I guess finally, the feedback that we get from our clients, is that they love our research, they love the research that we put out, they love the way that we share our ideas about what the key themes are in the market and what we are doing about that in terms of managing portfolios.

World Finance: And Andrew, how are you innovating, how are you finding profit in a low growth world?

Transparency, together with a dialogue with clients, is what I call innovative

Andrew Bascand: We know that investors are really struggling with this as well, so three years ago we sat down and talked to a whole lot of our clients, and asked them a number of questions about how they’d like their money invested in this world. So we didn’t just dream up something, it was a process of discussion. And the answers were quite simple; we’d like lower volatility, we’d like yield, and we’re appropriate- we want diversified growth.

More importantly in fixed income portfolios, we just don’t want any defaults, we want high investment grade. So we set about thinking about these ideas, and we built two new key products; an Australasian equity income product, which has lower volatility and strong yields, and we built a core fixed interest product, which ensures significant diversification across a number of strategies, providing investors with a real understanding of what’s going on beneath the bonnet.

And that transparency, together with the dialogue with clients, is what I call innovative. Innovative to me is not strapping on a whole lot of derivative contracts and using a smart computer and black scholes model, I think we now know that real investing beyond that.

World Finance: And all of this adds up to some impressive returns for your clients

Andrew Bascand: I think clients know that markets go up and down. The last year has been great, we’ve got returns in our equity products well above 30 percent for the year and in our fixed interest products, ALFAs, or added value of well over 1.5 percent, which is really great in those sorts of products. But our clients know that to get those sort of returns you have to take risks, so they’re more focussed on the long term nature of what we’re doing, and over more than 13.5 years now we’ve delivered strong results in our core products, and there have been ups and downs, but people want to build real wealth over the long term, and that is the sort of dialogue we can have with our clients.

Andrew, Christian, thank you.

Thank you.