What is a Wrap Solution

A Wrap Solution provides the investor with the opportunity to access a significant range of investment, whilst retaining access to the account through one source, these are normally access through an ISA or a SIPP.

Wraps are a relatively new concept, but have proved extremely popular amongst investors in recent years. The aim of the service is to offer you easy access to the country's leading fund managers and a variety of other investments through one access point. A Wrap allows you to hold you shares, pensions, investment bonds, structured products, ISA's and Unit Trusts all in one place, whilst still allowing the desired spread of investments.

Consolidating and managing investments through one account is efficient and cost effective.

This type of account allows you to switch between different fund managers within the same arrangement at a low cost, which will make it highly unlikely that you will need to transfer to an alternative provider at a later stage.

Broadly speaking, the traditional use of Insurance Company "packaged" products has not served our clients very well. The lack of transparency and the emergence of hidden penalty clauses have often led to our clients being unable to predict or control their financial plans. Insurance companies have often sought to treat clients as a collective group, rather than as individuals, imposing financial penalties to protect their own interests, regardless of their effect on clients. Additionally, the remuneration process for IFAs was determined by the Insurance industry and was biased towards the sales process. IFAs have had little opportunity or incentive to be involved with the progress of clients investments and we felt that it would be very desirable to increase our involvement with our clients achievement of their investment goals.


The introduction of a Wrap Solution has allowed us to address many of these issues and to give clients a clear understanding of the process involved in saving money for a future event such as retirement.


By investing in this manner we are able to select almost any unit trust manager operating in the UK. Using a strict investment selection process we feel confident that using this method of investment will produce superior returns to those associated to both your existing arrangements and those of Stakeholder. The slightly higher charging structure also allows for the underlying investment selection to be reviewed annually ensuring it continues to meet with your risk profile and performance expectations.

I would point out however, that there is no guarantee that this method of investment will produce superior results to those of a conventional insurance based investment or pension product.But historically, the types of investments selected have outperformed those associated to insurance companies.

The additional performance can be significant, the charges are generally a little higher, but I would like to point out that Sterling Financial Services do not receive any additional commission or any other incentive for recommending this course of action. The charges are higher, because they are justified through historically producing higher investment performance.