Omnis Investments Limited, manager of the Omnis fund range available exclusively to Openwork advisers, has appointed Franklin Templeton Fund Management Limited to run the Omnis UK Equity Fund, effective 11 June 2018.
Franklin Templeton’s UK equity team, which is based in Leeds, manages funds across the UK market cap and has an average of 23 years’ experience per team member. The Omnis UK Equity Fund will be managed by Colin Morton, who will utilise the broad expertise of the entire team. Morton joined Franklin Templeton when it acquired Rensburg Fund Management in January 2011. He joined Rensburg in 1988 as a private client executive, becoming an investment manager in 1991. He began his career in 1983 as a trainee stockbroker with Wise Speke & Co.
Morton and his team will manage the fund on the same basis as the team’s existing Franklin UK equity strategies, investing in attractively valued, good-quality businesses with pricing power and cashflow-generating abilities.
The Omnis UK Equity Fund, which was previously managed by Schroder Investment Management Limited, recently reached a landmark GBP1 billion in size, and is a key part of Openwork’s Graphene advisory models and the discretionary Omnis Managed Portfolio Service.
Morton says: “We are thrilled to have been selected to run the Omnis UK Equity Fund for Omnis Investments. The fund will be managed as a core fund, drawing on the experience of the whole Franklin UK equity team.”
Toni Meadows, Chief Investment Officer, Omnis Investments, says: “We see the team at Franklin Templeton as offering a genuine core approach to investing in UK equities, having also built a formidable reputation of expertise in medium and smaller company stocks; this is a real stand-out feature compared to rival managers in the UK equity sector, and we think they will do an excellent job managing the Omnis UK Equity Fund.”
