The UBS wirehouse's home office team is ramping up their select list for mutual funds and other investment products after making a key research alliance this spring.

Jeff Miller, head of wealth management advice and platforms for UBS Wealth Management Americas, confirms the wirehouse's high-conviction list currently includes about 100 mutual funds, ETFs, and separately managed accounts.

"It should grow to roughly 300 over the next year or so," Miller tells MFWire.

There's tremendous demand from our clients and from our FAs. Our advisory business is growing rapidly ... There's an obvious need to bring on new strategies to fill that demand. We're not going to have all our eggs in one basket.

That high-conviction list is put together by WMA's own manager research analysts, led by Ray Joseph. Joseph reports to Marilee Ferone, head of WMA's advisory solutions business, and Ferone reports to Miller.

The move comes after Miller teamed up with Mercer Investments earlier this year. Mercer's 120-plus manager research analysts are helping broaden UBS' coverage of the universe of investment products out there, allowing Joseph and his team at UBS to concentrate on the select list.

"We have to go both wide and deep at the same time," Miller says. "We determined that we would utilize Mercer to help us go wide ... It allows us to take our highly skilled manager analysts and focus them on the development of high-conviction ideas, high-conviction strategies out from that universe: to go deep."

Joseph and his team of manager research analysts at UBS utilize what Ferone describes as a "proprietary methodology" to sort through all the data and come up with the high-conviction list.

"In essence, Mercer does the first-order research and we do the second-order research," Miller says. 

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