The Thrivent Managed Accounts Program offers financial professionals a simple and effective way to build their practices while offering their clients a high level of professional portfolio management. The Thrivent Managed Account program is offered by Thrivent Asset Management which serves as the investment adviser for the Thrivent Mutual Funds.

Also known as model portfolios, managed accounts are actively-managed portfolios of mutual funds that can be geared to the specific risk and return objectives of your clients.

As a financial professional, you can help your clients determine which model works best for their unique situations. Once that decision is made, you simply allocate their assets to the appropriate managed account and let the Thrivent investment team handle the day-to-day decisions in the portfolios.

The managed accounts solution offers several key advantages:

• Puts the responsibility for portfolio decision-making in the hands of an experienced full-time professional asset management team.
• Frees you and your staff of the time and effort necessary to research the market, manage your clients’ portfolios and track their fund performance. As a result, you have more time to manage your practice, meet with clients and prospects, and grow your business.
• Because this is a discretionary program, clients pass the decision-making authority to Thrivent Asset Management. This means that you will no longer need to track down clients for verbal confirmation to make trades, nor is it up to you to execute and document each new trade.

Variety of options

Thrivent offers a variety of model portfolios to meet the varied time horizons, risk tolerances, and income needs and goals of most investors. The portfolios are designed with a complete investor life cycle in mind from growth of assets to retirement income.

The Thrivent Managed Accounts Program features seven options, including five “Select” models that focus on accumulation and two income-focused models. (See chart below.)

Premium service

You and your clients can expect advice, due diligence and timely information through the managed accounts program to assist you in communicating with your clients.

Thrivent Asset Management produces monthly performance reports and quarterly commentaries. These commentaries provide economic and market overviews, comments regarding the performance of the portfolios and the latest holdings and changes. You will also be notified each time a tactical trade is made, with commentary on the rationale for that decision.ⁱ

High-level management

The broad and experienced team of Thrivent investment professionals oversees the managed accounts investment process. Key features of the program include:

• Long-term oriented. The investment team initially sets up the long-term strategic allocations of each portfolio and monitors these accounts daily in terms of risk management, manager performance and potential tactical changes.

• Active management. The team actively trades the portfolio—shifting tactical allocations when deemed necessary—and will replace funds when performance has deteriorated, when their investment style has shifted or when a significant change in management or process casts doubt on the fund’s ability to produce similar results in the future.

• Style purity. The management team uses a sophisticated selection process intended to identify style-pure managers and funds with consistent risk-adjusted performance that they believe are most likely to outperform over a full market cycle. Then they monitor the managers and funds on an ongoing basis to make sure they maintain this style consistency. This discipline helps to ensure that the model portfolios consistently provide market exposures that align with their overall market views and objectives, as well as the clients’ goals and objectives.

• Diversification of styles and managers. The Thrivent Managed Accounts Program provides a broad array of investment styles and managers. The investment team uses a hybrid approach in terms of management styles, blending both actively-managed and passive funds. The actively-managed products may use either a fundamental, bottom-up security selection process or an active quantitative-based management approach. Additionally, they recognize that sometimes passive, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) may be the best way to maintain tactical exposures or hedge active exposures to specific asset classes while keeping expenses down. Thrivent managed accounts also use a diverse blend of proprietary and non-proprietary funds, while many competitors offer model portfolios that use mostly or only proprietary funds.

• As-needed trading. While many firms have a set schedule to conduct trades in their model portfolios on a quarterly or monthly basis, Thrivent has a more fluid and responsive process. They constantly monitor the portfolios using both quantitative and qualitative tools, relying on the latest market and economic data to form views and make decisions. They implement tactical trades in the managed accounts as needed rather than according to a pre-set schedule. The team will also trigger rebalancing as needed in order to keep client portfolios in line with target allocations.

• Flexible income distribution options. Clients in the Income-Focused models have the option to reinvest dividends or to request a set amount of income on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. They can choose to automatically distribute all the dividends from the underlying mutual funds in either Income-Focused model. Although this means the clients’ income amounts will fluctuate, it is the most efficient distribution method because they are not selling positions to pay income, which could necessitate some unintended rebalancing.

• Continual oversight. The Thrivent Managed Portfolios Committee oversees all the firm’s multi-asset class solutions including the Asset Allocation Funds, Income Plus Funds and model portfolios – and is ultimately responsible for all decision-making. Although members meet formally once a month for review purposes, the portfolios are monitored continuously for their overall performance, the underlying funds’ performance, manager changes, and style purity.

Why Thrivent Managed Accounts?

Thrivent Asset Management launched its first mutual fund in 1970 and its asset allocation funds in 2005. The Select model portfolios, created in 2007, have a long track record of performance, and the Income-Focused model portfolios have been around since 2012.

The Thrivent managed accounts program is backed by the full power of a Fortune 500 company with more than $150 billion in assets under management. The investment team is comprised of about 115 seasoned investment professionals, of which more than 80% have a graduate degree, a CFA^® designation, or both. More than 80% of Thrivent investment professionals also have at least 10 years of investment industry experience and more than 50% have at least 20 years.

To learn more about the Thrivent Managed Accounts Program , contact a regional consultant or call 800-521-5308.