Cristian Angeloni (pictured), deputy editor and special projects editor at Investment Week.
Checking whether an asset manager has released its annual Assessment of Value (AoV) report has become almost a daily ritual for me, to understand how a fund house has fared in the previous 12 months in terms of performance, fees and overall service to clients.
AoVs were first introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority in 2019 to assess whether strategies were providing fair value to investors.
The regulatory initiative has since fallen within the scope of the Consumer Duty since its introduction in July 2023.
Almost 80% of Jupiter AM funds provide 'consistent' value in AoV test
The Investment Week team has been providing regular coverage of these reports for years, to highlight and analyse trends taking place at company, fund or even asset class level.
For instance, this week we reported on Jupiter and St James's Place's (SJP) AoVs.
Jupiter found that none of its funds failed the value assessment for the year, although eight out of its arsenal of 37 strategies were found to not have ‘consistently' delivered value.
SJP fared a different fate in the year to 30 June 2025, with eight of its funds failing the overall assessment due to issues of underperformance and comparable charges. An additional ten were also red flagged for performance but passed the value test.
Although AoVs have become an analytical staple to understand whether a firm's offerings provided value to investors, it is an extensive and costly exercise for asset managers, which are required to publish them annually.
This poses the question: Who actually reads them?
I have spoken to a plethora of fund managers over the past few months, asking them whether AoVs ever come up in client meetings or if they have ever been held accountable for the outcomes of any of their value assessment reports in previous years.
For every single one of them the answer was ‘No'.
Eight St James's Place funds fail value assessment
Each manager I spoke with said they could hardly recall the last time AoVs were brought up by either wealth managers, financial advisers or individual investors, and they had never been asked to explain or defend the results of the report.
For those that may be concerned about accessibility and how easy these documents are to understand, I have to give credit to the asset managers.
Although some are a bit trickier to locate – some website diving is needed – the reports themselves are incredibly easy to understand both in terms of language and visuals too.
Most value assessments either feature a traffic light system – red for failing to deliver value; amber for providing value but not consistently, and green for providing overall value – or a star rating, just like film or theatre critics would assign to their reviews, to simply visualise the outcome of the analysis.
What is interesting is that anytime we cover asset managers' AoV, they are easily among the most read stories of that specific week.
For perspective, the Jupiter and SJP AoV stories we published this week are both in our top ten most read.
So clearly there is interest in understanding their outcomes, at least from a trade press perspective, but this does not seem to be matched with direct engagement with firms' own reports as far as I can tell.
In June, the FCA revealed it was looking to "reduce and simplify" AoV reporting requirements for asset managers, after some firms argued that the costs associated with the publication of these reports "outweigh the benefits".
And I have to give it to them, if the only people who actually engage with and take time to read AoVs are journalists, do value assessment reports achieve the objective that prompted the FCA to introduce them in the first place?
As you can imagine, I don't have an answer for this question, but I'd like to use this Friday Briefing as a call to action and encourage anybody who may have something to say about the matter to get in touch, as I'd be very curious to understand what industry players think about the use these reports have for the sector.
