The investment team employ a bottom-up approach within a repeatable, data driven investment process. The team will invest across the capital structure of financial institutions, investments may include secured bonds, senior unsecured bonds and subordinated or hybrid bonds.

Bottom-up credit selection forms the focal point of the investment process, and the investment team conducts a rigorous analysis of an issuer’s solvency and ability to meet its debt obligations before any investment is made. The team conduct in-depth research into issuers’ business models and assesses multiple fundamental factors both on a historical and forward looking basis to derive how future credit quality may evolve. Due consideration is given to the structure of the issuer, regulatory treatment, creditor rights, access to markets, revenue streams, customer bases, governance and management styles.

Whilst bottom-up analysis remains at the forefront of the investment process, investment themes help provide the top-down framework which supplements the bottom-up approach. These investment themes will include the macro environment, consumer trends, technology, demographics, regulation, currency or other external trends that may impact an individual target investment but the focus is on the issuer itself and the fundamental analysis of its ability to meet its debt obligations rather than on global macro-economic trend.

The unconstrained remit of the strategy provides the portfolio manager with the freedom to avoid unwanted risk concentrations by region, currency or sector that exist from time to time in credit benchmarks.