Welcome to Active, but Elevated

Tim Paulin
Hi, I'm Tim Paulin and this is Active Talks, where we dive into what makes Touchtone Funds distinctively active.

Mary as senior vice president and head of distribution, how would you explain our distinctively active approach, particularly to someone who's unfamiliar with it and in regard to how it affects our client relationships and sales strategies?

Mary Mock
We aim to give our clients an exceptional experience that differs from what they find in the asset management world, and that pertains to both the distinctively active side of our products and the distinctively active way that we manage our business consulting relationships with clients. So for us, distinctively active is the pond in which to fish, in order to beat the bench, you must look different, and we aim to give our clients an experience that's unique by providing them access to professional money managers. We'd like to add alpha to portfolios, but we also like to add alpha to advisors’ practices in the same way and we do that through our PAR program, helping by deepening relationships, improving and optimizing the practice, and so at the core of what we do is a differentiated and a distinctively active experience, both in products and in our business consulting approach to our relationships with clients.

Tim Paulin
Hi, I'm Tim Paulin and this is Active Talks, where we dive into what makes Touchtone Funds distinctively active. Our practice management consulting program is a significant element of how we deliver value to and build relationships with advisors. So, Mary, how does that program help advisors to more effectively implement active strategies?

Mary Mock
Our Practice Management Consulting program, or PAR as we refer to it, is really multifaceted and one core component to that is our portfolio fortification and construction module. It allows us a window into the investments that are underlying in an advisor's book of business, and it gives us a chance to apply our proprietary scope lens to the advisor's products in the same way we apply them to our own.

Tim Paulin
As someone who leads distribution, you've seen firsthand how market conditions shift and how that can impact relationships with advisors. So how does the distinctively active approach help advisors and Touchstone to navigate the changes in the markets?

Mary Mock
One observation I'll make in my 20 plus years of experience at Touchstone is market conditions are constantly changing, and that positions us very well to help advisors navigate those changes. Touchstone has an exceptional level of thought leadership from our Touchstone Asset Allocation Committee guidance to our market strategist approach, as well as the commentary that we receive from our portfolio managers.

Tim Paulin
Hi, I'm Tim Paulin and this is Active Talks where we dive into what makes Touchtone Funds distinctively active.

Matt what role does Touchstone’s distinctively active philosophy play in portfolio construction, and how does this influence outcomes for investors?

Matt Barry
Distinctively active is really key to what we do at Touchstone. Our portfolio managers are building high conviction portfolios of their best ideas that typically look very different from the benchmarks. Our philosophy here is based on academic research, it’s looked at what are the characteristics of active managers that had historically been associated with future outperformance. So the types of strategies we call distinctively active have higher active share, more conviction in their best ideas, and a willingness to let those best ideas play out over time. Overall, we believe in order to beat the benchmark, you've got to be different from benchmark.

Tim Paulin
Matt, how does Touchstone ensure that its active ETFs are aligned with emerging trends, while maintaining the discipline required for long term success and consistency with Touchstone’s distinctively active philosophy?

Matt Barry
Yeah, so we are constantly monitoring the marketplace for evolving trends. We do that in a couple different ways. First is looking at the data where it flows going, which categories are investors expressing interest in and the second is just talking to our clients. We listen to them where they express interest in terms of different categories or where they see a need for more good product. At the same time, we think it's critical that we stick to our bread and butter and distinctively active strategies and those types of managers and strategies that we're known for.

A good example of this recently is our Emerging Markets ex-China ETF. That's a space where we've heard a lot of interest from clients over the past few years, and we're able to partner with Sands Capital, best in class asset manager that we've had a relationship with as a firm for nearly two decades to bring together, bring to market a high conviction, actively managed, Emerging Markets ex-China ETF.