Merchant Investors links to Sanlam flagship funds

Merchant Investors, the specialist pensions and investment provider, has added the Sanlam Global Financial Fund, Sanlam Global Best Ideas Fund and Sanlam UK Equity Fund, to the range of fund links available through its OneSIPP, onshore bonds and other products.

Sanlam Limited, Merchant Investors’ parent company, is the second largest financial services provider in South Africa, and established Sanlam Asset Management (Ireland) Limited (SAMI) in June 1997. SAMI offers UCITS III approved regional, specialist sector and global investment funds through a combination of manager of manager and single manager funds.

The Global Financial Fund is SAMI’s flagship fund, with a 5 star Morningstar rating and is run by a small dynamic team lead by renowned South African fund manager, Kokkie Kooyman. The fund takes an actively managed bottom-up stock selection approach, which has seen the fund listed in the top three global financial funds in every year of its eight year history.

The Global Best Ideas Fund and UK Equity Fund both have 4 star ratings from Morningstar.

Merchant Investors now offers more than 100 fund links from a range of fund managers, spanning the major IMA regions and sectors. The range includes many of the best performing flagship funds in the industry as well as multi-manager funds, emerging market funds (Eastern Europe, BRIC and China), and global high yield funds.

Richard Ellis, head of sales and marketing at Merchant Investors, said: ”We are thrilled to be able to offer clients access to SAMI’s market-leading funds and to leverage the strength of brand and expertise behind our parent company’s name.

The Global Financial Fund has had exceptional performance over an 8 year period and we are very excited about offering this via our product range. This further demonstrates the advantages we have of being flexible and creative with our fund links.”

Kokkie Kooyman Fund Manager, said: “Financial shares are being severely de-rated and starting to offer extremely good value. The advantage of a global financial fund is that we can pick and mix between some of the fast growing Indian, Korean and Turkish banks (to name but three emerging markets offering good value and growth) and the debris of the fall-out in developed markets caused by the US sub-prime and western banking mortgage and liquidity crisis.”