Registered company number: 132723
Registered address: First Floor, Durell House, 28 New Street, St Helier, Jersey, JE2 3RA
GPP part of the Titan Wealth Holdings group has provided funding for the annual ‘MyLondon’ project, which aims to empower those who are and have recently been made homeless.
GPP has provided the funding for prizes for the MyLondon photography competition, which has run every Summer in London for the past decade. The 2023 event took place between Friday 26 May and Friday 2 June, with awards including best portrait and most creative photo. Participants in the contest have all recently become homeless; coming mainly from art groups run by homelessness-sector organisations, including Crisis, St Mungo’s and 240 Project.
The MyLondon project also involves photography training, an exhibition, and the printing and selling of calendars, greeting cards, and photographs. The initiative aims to inspire people affected by homelessness in London to create lasting change in their own lives through confidence building, learning new skills and social inclusion. It also seeks to increase understanding of the issues surrounding homelessness in a positive way.
MyLondon is run by Café Art – a London-based charity with a mission to change lives and empower people affected by homelessness through creativity and entrepreneurship. Titan Wealth contacted Cafe Art to rent paintings and MYLONDON photos to decorate their recently expanded office in London. The rental scheme supports artists and photographers who are and have been homeless. By supporting these people Titan Wealth is helping us help people reconnect with the wider community and also to help them financially.
Find out more about Café Art – www.cafeart.org.uk/mylondon
Julian Parker, Chairman, GPP, said: “MyLondon is a fantastic initiative, which empowers people affected by homelessness in London by providing them with a safe and sociable environment where they can express themselves through art. As a business, we are extremely passionate about charitable initiatives that are driving positive change in creative ways. We are committed to supporting charitable initiatives like MyLondon project, as the business continue to grow. .”Paul Ryan, at MyLondon, said: ‘’By helping Cafe Art and MYLONDON through supporting the 2023 MYLONDON project, which results in the 2024 MYLONDON calendar, Titan Wealth/GPP is making a real difference in a constructive and positive way’’
Well established business with c. £2.6bn in MPS portfolios
27 June 2023 – Titan Wealth Holdings [Titan Wealth] announces it has acquired investment research and consultancy firm Square Mile, subject to regulatory approval.
Square Mile brings a wealth of expertise, including a 21-strong team of research analysts covering the universe of UK retail funds, an investment management team responsible for Square Mile’s range of MPS solutions and its consultancy services for financial intermediaries and institutions. In Titan Wealth, Square Mile has secured a long-term shareholder, committed to growing and developing its range of client services enabling them to deliver enhanced customer outcomes, and helping to expand the firm’s market footprint.
The acquisition encompasses the c.£2.6bn in assets under management currently held within Square Mile’s MPS portfolios and will enable Titan Wealth to further expand its competitive, low-cost MPS proposition. Titan Wealth will also benefit from Square Mile’s broad industry relationships across the financial advice and asset management sectors.
Square Mile will continue to operate under its own brand following the acquisition and its management and wider team will remain in place both supporting and being supported by Titan Wealth in achieving its ambitions.
The acquisition takes Titan Wealth’s AUM to £12bn and strengthens the fully integrated client to custody solutions.
Andrew Fearon, Joint CEO & Head of M&A at Titan Wealth said: “Square Mile is a highly reputable business whose products and services integrate and align seamlessly with Titan’s. This latest acquisition further bolsters our aim to bring high-quality execution and administration to the asset and wealth management sector through our our client to custody solutions and services.”
Richard Romer-Lee, Square Mile’s CEO, said: ”This acquisition represents a very exciting opportunity for our clients, the business and our team. The backing of Titan Wealth will help us strengthen and broaden our clients offerings, supports Square Mile’s long-term growth aspirations and opens new professional avenues for our staff within the broader group. Moreover, Titan Wealth and Square Mile have a close cultural fit with a client-centric approach and a focus on delivering superior customer outcomes and we are confident that this development will bring significant benefits to all.”
The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval
Well established business with c.£600m AUM and offices in Peterborough and Bishop’s Stortford
Titan Wealth Holdings [Titan Wealth] announces it has entered into a share purchase agreement to acquire [subject to shareholder and regulatory approval] Ravenscroft‘s UK-based investment management business. Guernsey-based Ravenscroft is a well-established wealth management business. Its two offices in the UK have a combined AUM of £600m and provide discretionary, advisory and execution-only services to nearly 2,300 clients.
The acquisition takes Titan Wealth’s AUM to £9.4bn and reinforces our current capabilities and strengthens our fully integrated client to custody solutions and services.
Ravenscroft operates from two offices in England. The majority of clients are based in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire and they will benefit from access to Titan Wealth’s wider group products and services.
The Peterborough office has grown organically through personal relationships and direct client recommendations. The investment proposition is largely bespoke, investing predominantly in funds and with some equities. The Bishop’s Stortford office investment proposition is primarily based on “model-style” portfolios. The teams from both offices will move across to Titan Wealth.
Andrew Fearon, Joint CEO & Head of M&A at Titan said: ‘Ravenscroft is a well-run business possessing a high-quality, loyal client base. The business will integrate with our network, enabling greater distribution of the investment and advisory offering that form part of our client to custody solutions and services.’
Jon Ravenscroft, Group CEO of Ravenscroft, said: ‘Titan has acquired a number of asset management firms in accordance with its growth strategy and we have spent a considerable amount of time ensuring they were the correct fit. Titan has the same ‘client first’ ethos and I’m confident that this development is the right move for both our UK teams and their clients. It will also allow Ravenscroft to focus on the offshore market – which we know extremely well – where the large majority of our clients, shareholders and staff remain. We would like to thank M&A specialist Dyer Baade & Company for their assistance in this transaction’
This International Women’s Day we decided to do something a little different. When it comes to Environmental, Social, and Governance and sustainable investment, there is a hidden demographic that most investment decisions do not consider. This week we dive deeper into our Sustainable investment portfolio policies to see how our investment policies, screening practices, and choices impact women in communities where our investments have a real effect. Achieving milestones such as UN Sustainable Development Goals in our sector requires an intersectional feminist view, protecting women on the ground who are being directly impacted by our allocations and decisions. By looking at an investable organisation’s means of production, board and funding decisions, and internal policies we can assess whether it particularly negatively impacts women on a Social and Governance level.
So then – how can this apply to women globally? Women are particularly at risk of falling foul to Modern Slavery due to pre-existing marginalisation, poverty, and social norms.[i] The Modern Slavery document cites the business sector as needing to play a stronger and ‘more systemic’ role in removing the main key factors which drive the slavery market. 70% of the 40.3 million people in modern slavery are women and girls; and investment into companies with non-disclosed supply chains, unregulated resourcing and non-transparent human and worker rights is contributing to the international suffering of women and girls.[ii]
Our Sustainability lead, James Peel, writes below explaining how our policies for our Sustainability portfolio are designed to curb these, and ultimately how our sector has much further to go.
The systemic lack of gender equality in the business and investment community has been a problem for a long time. Although a gender gap – the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes, according to the World Economic Forum – still persists, there is good reason to believe that it will start to close meaningfully in the future. This is because there is an increasing understanding of the myriad benefits that come with efforts to improve equality. For example, the UN Principles of Responsible Investment notes that more diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at a company can positively affect decision-making, employee engagement, reputation amongst stakeholders, innovation and access to new markets. The organisation also warns of the risks of not prioritising DEI in the workplace.
For most investment product providers, the E in ESG has historically been the primary focus of attention. This bias is reflected in the make-up of our investable universe, which includes plenty of products that consider environmental concepts like climate change but far fewer that consider social concepts like equality or, more specifically, things like women’s health. However, that doesn’t mean that integrating social considerations into the investment process is unfeasible, especially as the quantity and quality of relevant non-financial data continues to improve.
Our sustainable investment policy demands that the strategies within our investment proposition governed by this policy achieve an MSCI ESG Rating of AA, which corresponds to a classification of Leader. This means that our exposure to and management of equality-relevant issues like labour management, human capital development and corporate governance is optimal. More, by excluding companies in violation of the UN Global Impact from our investable universe, we ensure that we have no exposure to companies flagged for breaching the 6th of the Ten Principles of the Global Impact, which states that “businesses should uphold the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation”.
With the help of one of our new data providers, Util, we are now also able to measure whether the actions of companies held across our sustainability-labelled proposition are generating any positive or negative outcomes in the real world. To do so, Util uses natural language processing to assess how companies affect the UN Sustainable Development Goals (including SDG 5, Gender Equality), which can be further broken down into thousands of other sustainability concepts.
There remains a long way to go to close the gender gap, but the reasons to prioritise doing so are clear. Helpfully, relevant non-financial data is better than it used to be, making it easier to shift capital allocation towards solving this important global challenge.
For instance, when investing in the healthcare sector in an ESG portfolio, there are an increasing number of factors to assess from a Social and Governance angle. Healthcare, particularly in the United States, suffers from a large medical research bias, heavily favouring men.[iii] Papers from medical educational institutions are revealing that the industry shows a consistent pattern for favouring male pharma, and funding pharmaceuticals for men, this study reveals that while Viagra was approved 6 months after being submitted to the FDA for approval, it took 17 years for the contraceptive pill.[iv] So then, when investing in healthcare we should be looking at the board’s budget allocation, questioning if it allocates enough to female pharma such as menopause research, questioning if the research is also conducted on female trial subjects. The above study highlights that there is even a gender discrimination between what medical insurers will cover, most insurers will cover a prescription for Viagra but not the contraceptive pill.[v] Should one wish to invest in the healthcare insurance sector in an ESG portfolio, it’s worth considering if there is gender discrimination in the company from a granular level up to a systemic, discriminatory policy-making level. If one is holding healthcare stock in an ESG portfolio which allocates the majority of its funding to men’s pharma, tests drugs on mixed sex subjects, and allocates healthcare policy based on systemic gender or sex challenges, then it may not really meet your ESG’s ‘Social’ criteria at all.
Women then are placed between a rock and a hard place when facing our industry, CityWire reported in 2021 that only 11.8% of portfolio managers were women – and that this was an improvement on last year.[vi] So not only are women typically absent from the investment decision-making process, but the industry is relying on the overwhelming amount of men in the decision-making position to consider the factors that affect this demographic, hidden away in the overlooked Social and Governance part of ESG.
Women are a hidden demographic in ESG, and by investing in organisations which comply with the UN Sustainable Development goals and the like, comes better reassurance that women are not disproportionately affected by our investment decisions. While we have much further to go with representation and policies to protect and empower, there is much, much more work to be done.
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings/esg-ratings-key-issue-framework
https://unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/mission/principles
[i]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/726283/modern-slavery-womens-economic-empowerment.pdf
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16040176/, https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1204&context=jlh
[iv] https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1204&context=jlh
[v] Ibid.
[vi] https://citywire.com/americas/news/alpha-female-2021-just-11-8-of-portfolio-managers-are-women-and-that-s-an-improvement/a1553798
Every year, thousands of young Londoners are pushed into homelessness and danger through no fault of their own.
That’s why New Horizon Youth Centre exists, and why our new sponsorship is all the more important.
Based in the King’s Cross area, New Horizon Youth Centre (NHYC) is a non-profit organisation offering support to young people aged 16-24 to overcome the barriers life has put in their way and solve their homelessness for good. Through their day centre and outreach services, they offer expert help with health, safety, youth work, and housing.
Statistics have been provided for us by the charity on the stark reality of the UK’s youth homelessness crisis. In their 2021 annual report, NHYC recorded that 30% of youth they provided services to have experience of the care system, and 32% have experienced the criminal justice system.[1] The charity also reports a 20% increase of young people sleeping rough in 2020 compared to 2019.[2] As well as providing housing, NHYC work tirelessly to bring stability, safety and support that a young person needs to start getting their lives back on track.
At Titan Wealth Holdings, we continue to be impressed by the work that NHYC undertake. Our partnership arose from Executive Partner, Julian Parker’s fondness and support for the charity, and Titan Wealth Holdings were keen to take over the sponsorship of the NHYC after acquiring GPP’s custody and clearing firm. We’re proud to sponsor such a charity, and we’ll keep doing our part to aid NHYC in their task to provide homeless youth with opportunities and solid foundations. For as long as young people find themselves homeless and unsafe in London, NHYC will be on a mission to give their potential a home. To find out more about the charity and their work, please follow the link below: https://nhyouthcentre.org.uk/
[1] Statistics from the New Horizon Youth Centre Annual Report 2021, https://nhyouthcentre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/NHYC_AnnualReport_20_21-Final.pdf, page 6.
[2] Ibid, 13.