The North American organisations have joined hands to enable a stronger push into the Asian wealth management market.

US-based investments firm SEI has widened its asset management partnership with BMO Financial Group into the Asian market, and says it sees the region as a key growth area.

In January, Toronto-listed BMO launched a new solution comprised of four risk-profiled Global Strategic Portfolios managed by SEI. These portfolios give different levels of active management and diversification across six core asset classes: equity, fixed income, inflation sensitive, liquidity, absolute return and income. 

“Bringing our expertise in building and managing custom investment solutions to Asia further supports our strategy to provide best-in-class services and solutions to our global clients,” Kevin Barr, executive vice president of SEI and head of the investment management unit and asset management distribution team, said today. 

“It [Asia] is a marketplace that’s been talked about for some time in terms of wealth creation and generation. We want to partner with large wealth managers and private banks,” Barr told this publication in a call. 

Asked if the expansion means hires in Asia, Barr said: “Our model is about building long-term relationships and we will be staffing accordingly. The trend across the global marketplace is to highlight advice and firms are looking to differentiate themselves through advice. We are seeing this also in Asia.”

SEI’s new strategic partnership with BMO Private Bank Asia builds upon a 21-year asset management relationship with Bank of Montreal Nesbitt Burns in Canada. BMO NB’s Quadrant programme is a jointly-designed mutual fund wrap programme that uses SEI’s goals-based asset allocation advice and is implemented via SEI’s underlying Canadian Asset Class Funds.

Quadrant is available to over 1,300 BMO NB advisors and their retail clients across Canada. Additionally, BMO Wealth Management, an SEI client in the U.S. since 2005, is currently on SEI’s legacy platform, TRUST 3000®, and will migrate their existing book of business to the SEI Wealth PlatformSM in 2019. 

“Our partnership with SEI will enable us to further enhance our investment solutions to meet the needs of our private bank clients in Asia,” said Monique Chan, CEO of BMO Private Bank Asia. “BMO has a longstanding relationship with SEI in North America, and we look forward to expanding that collaboration to Asia.” 

At the end of last year, through its subsidiaries and partnerships in which the company has a significant interest, SEI managed, advised or administered $884 billion in hedge, private equity, mutual fund and
pooled or separately managed assets, including $307 billion in assets under management and $573 billion in client assets under administration.