Scottish Widows launches 23 new fund links within its life and pensions fund range

SW Newton Managed Income Fund launched exclusively for Scottish Widows. Scottish Widows to offer wide range of State Street indexed funds

Scottish Widows today announces it is launching 23 new funds within its life and pensions fund range, to be available from the 21 April 2008.

During 2007, Scottish Widows reviewed its fund manager relationships and all external fund links.

Scottish Widows will have both guided architecture and open architecture offerings and has increased its commitment to monitor and govern the guided funds by investing heavily in a specialist fund-monitoring team.

Scottish Widows will now have links with 13 asset management strategic partners (including SWIP) to offer an improved range of funds to policyholders.

As part of the range, Newton Investment Management has launched the SW Newton Managed Income Fund exclusively for Scottish Widows which will be managed by Tim Wilson, Director of Investment Strategy and Asset Allocation at Newton Investment Management.

Gareth Trainor, Senior Manager, Fund Monitoring and Governance at Scottish Widows, said: "We're launching these funds as part of a recent major review of our life and pensions fund range and are delighted to be working with carefully selected strategic partners.

Our specialist fund monitoring and governance team will monitor these managers and funds to ensure they remain the best choice for our policyholders.

"We link to fund management companies that are in demand.

We know that dual-branded funds are attractive to advisers and investors, so first we choose the fund management companies and then the funds.

However we believe in building meaningful and effective partnerships, and not simply amass fund links.

What is important to us is quality and not quantity.

We want to harness the different fund managers' expertise and strengths for the benefit of our customers.

"We have invested heavily in creating an investment centre of excellence within Scottish Widows.

Our governance overlay monitors managers and funds on behalf of both advisers and our clients, resulting in a significantly improved life and pension fund range." Scottish Widows was one of the first life and pension companies to introduce links to externally managed funds in 1999.

Scottish Widows is committed to offering both open and guided architecture.

Open architecture allows advisers to choose from over 1000 funds from 55 investment houses through FundsNetwork for the Scottish Widows Retirement Account.

Alongside sits the guided architecture range, for life and other pension products, where advisers will have access to a carefully selected choice of funds with the governance already done.

This significantly improved fund range offers: 1.

Value.

In order to build more effective relationships with its external investment partners, Scottish Widows has reduced the number of external asset managers it deals with from 17 to 12.

The improved offering includes a core selection of funds managed by Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP), plus links to the 12 external managers.

By concentrating the number of investment partners, Scottish Widows looks forward to building more effective relationships so it can negotiate competitive charges and develop exclusive funds.

The 12 strategic external asset management partners are: Artemis, Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco Perpetual, Investec, Jupiter, JPMorgan, New Star, Newton, Schroders and State Street Global Advisors.

Governance in action Scottish Widows' long-term philosophy means it has invested heavily to build a dedicated fund monitoring and governance team which monitors all funds on an on-going basis to ensure they are on track to meet their long-term objectives.

The Governance team continually monitors all funds in the UK on an on-going basis to ensure Scottish Widows is offering its clients the best possible selection from which to choose.

This means funds and fund managers could be added to the Scottish Widows fund range, or removed, in the future.

As part of the comprehensive fund review, it became apparent that some managers were in a position to better fulfil the needs of Scottish Widows' customers.

As a result a number of funds, from a number of managers, will be closing.

The asset managers affected by the reduction in partnerships are with Aberdeen, Gartmore, Societe Generale, Threadneedle and UBS.

The funds that have been identified to close will not accept new business after 28 April 2008.

Policyholders will be given a free transfer to another fund within the platform range.

1.

Exciting and exclusive new links.

The SW Newton Managed Income Fund will not be available through any other life and pension range for at least 12 months.

Other new fund links include JPM Natural Resources and Schroder European Alpha Plus.

Scottish Widows is also offering a new and improved range of core tracker funds for its pension fund clients by working closely with one of the world's leading index tracking fund managers, State Street Global Advisors.

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