At the heart of Goldman Sachs’s approach to discretionary portfolio management is the belief that all the bank’s institutional clients ought to have access to the kind of expertise and strategies that historically might only have been accessible to the very biggest.
DPM is handled at Goldman by the portfolio management team, which adopts what it describes as an institutional process and structure. It seeks to give clients access to a whole range of internal and third-party managers, domestic and international, active and passive, spanning all kinds of product and investment vehicles.
Underpinning it all is a holistic approach that covers strategic planning, careful and responsive performance reporting, rebalancing and education.
The idea is that clients can then focus on their chief responsibilities rather than juggling a portfolio of investment consultants.
Just because a wealth manager has been given discretion over investment decisions doesn’t mean that clients are any less keen on knowing what those decisions are and how they meet their overall requirements, however.