M&G Performance Reporting

The bread and butter of any investment management house’s marketing is their ability to generate clear and concise reporting on the performance of their fund offerings. At M&G Investments, this takes the form of two types of documents:

• Monthly Fund Fact Sheets

• Quarterly Reports

Monthly Fund Fact Sheet

Independent Financial Advisers who, in most cases, invest their clients’ money with multiple investment management firms, have to view a myriad of fund fact sheets, all with varying formats, content and length on a monthly basis. When meeting a client, it wouldn’t be unheard of for some of to print up to 20 pages of reporting their portfolio’s performance.

It was in understanding the frustration, complexity and resources needed by a Financial Adviser that I decided to design M&G Investments’ fund fact sheet template with brevity. Before, it was a four-page report, with inefficient use of space and inconsistent layouts. By leveraging the support of a project team, I looked at all the variables that would affect the layout of each reporting metric (character count of stocks, annualised performance periods and investment returns) and designed the template so that it was dynamic enough to account for each fund’s unique specifics.

The layout is clean, simplified, follows a logical flow and reflects a balanced composition that showcases the fund’s information in two pages.

Quarterly Report

On a quarterly basis, more stringent reporting is required by M&G Investments’ institutional client base. A multi-page document, the quarterly report is a more “glossy” version of the standardised monthly fund fact sheet and features an in-depth commentary, written by the portfolio manager(s) taking into account a longer reporting period as well as market conditions that prevailed over the quarter.

To give the document a more premium feel, images featuring M&G Investments design element of the “window” is incorporated into the report. This breaks up the monotony of the data-heavy content, offering a time for the viewer to breathe between interpreting the complex information being presented.