Investment Product and Service Launches

Mutual fund-based portfolios within the Morningstar Managed Portfolios advisory service will now have allocations to the Morningstar Funds Trust, an open-end investment management company with nine multi-manager mutual funds managed by Morningstar Investment Management. Historically, these portfolios used third-party funds.

While the direct holdings of the mutual fund-based portfolios are changing, the portfolios’ stated investment objectives and risk levels will not change. Morningstar Investment Management’s investment principles, philosophy, and process will continue as is, and managed portfolios’ performance track records will be preserved. However, the portfolio management team is now able to allocate to managers who may not offer a mutual fund or whose subadvised account structure is less expensive. Also, Morningstar Investment Management is able to pass along costs savings to investors and implement investment ideas more nimbly using Morningstar Funds.

“We are thrilled to introduce the Morningstar Funds as building blocks for our multi-asset managed portfolios,” said Matt Radgowski, chief operating officer at Morningstar Investment Management. “These funds are aligned with our investment principles and corporate values of putting investors’ interests above all else.”

Investors using the Morningstar Managed Portfolios will now have a reduction in overall cost for managed portfolios, whose underlying holdings were once exclusively third-party mutual funds, says Cindy Galiano, director of product management at Morningstar Investment Management.

More information about Managed Portfolios is available here.

DWS Partners With Skyline AI for Real Estate Investing

DWS Group has entered into a strategic partnership with and has become a minority shareholder in Skyline AI, a real estate asset management technology company. Skyline AI uses proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) to source, analyze, acquire, manage and sell institutional-grade real estate investment opportunities throughout the U.S.

Using structured and unstructured machine learning models, Skyline AI’s technology is designed to enhance the investment process for real estate investments. The partnership is designed to allow DWS to build on its expertise in the real estate investment management space through the machine learning capabilities of Skyline AI. In addition, DWS’s real estate research team and Skyline AI’s data scientists will collaborate to further develop Skyline AI’s proprietary technology.  

“This is another step in our strategy to leverage DWS product capabilities to support our clients and make investments where we see opportunities to create value,” Pierre Cherki, DWS board member and co-head of the Investment Group at DWS, says. “Collaborating with an early stage company that uses AI to bolster efficiency and enhance the real estate investment process supports our overall aim of pursuing value for our clients through comprehensive and innovative investment strategies.”