Brewin Dolphin: Why we withdrew £100m mandate from Woodford

MPS segregated mandates

Brewin Dolphin withdrew a £100m segregated mandate from Woodford Investment Management last year as the wealth manager moved the bulk of the third-party investments in its Managed Portfolio Service (MPS) from retail funds to segregated mandates.

In January 2018, Brewin Dolphin announced plans to reduce the costs on its MPS by £3m a year by switching 60% of the assets to manager of manager funds.  The other 40% - investing in overseas equities, property and absolute return mandates - remain invested in retail funds.  As part of the new structure, four underlying manager of manager funds were launched in February 2018, covering UK equities, UK equity income, North American equities and global bonds.  At the time, it was announced that £100m of the UK equity income fund would be handed to Neil Woodford, manager of the £4.4bn ...