Financial products architect Mohamed El Hioum has joined Save to further develop our accounts and portfolios, including an upcoming ESG investment strategy.
As Save continues to grow, we’re proud to introduce recently joined teammates to our customers and readers. This week, we’re bragging about Mohamed El Hioum joining as Save’s Director of Product Development. He’s providing insight into his role at Save and the projects he’ll help develop together with the team.
After studying engineering and applied math, Mohamed has spent over 20 years in the financial industry mostly working for international investment banks, creating, and trading investment products with institutional clients such as public pensions, insurers, and asset managers. He is also a CFA chartered holder.
This blog highlights his work and offers our customers insight into our diversified portfolio management and future product development.
1. What is your primary role at Save, and what attracted you to work at Save?
Mohamed: My role is to work with our partners and providers to expand Save’s account offerings. Our unique position and business model allow us to enhance existing financial products. Our accounts already enhance traditional savings accounts and debit and credit cards, but there’s potential to spread our strategies to other financial products, including insurance and loans.
2. How do you feel Save makes investing more efficient for people?
Mohamed: Most financial products have layers of fees, which means most investors don’t fully benefit from the powers of the financial markets. At Save, we leverage technology, innovation, and market access to allow a broader audience to access the benefits of investing.
Efficiency is only one of the benefits of our products. By coupling this with our innovative solution, our customers can appreciate the benefits of investing and plan their future with more confidence.
Save’s accounts center around our clients. While most financial products focus on incentivizing salespeople and the banks that offer them, we focus on benefiting our customers by investing what otherwise would have been fees to intermediaries. We even pass on collecting our management fee until the customers’ return exceeds our fees. This alone is a first in the industry.
3. How would you break down each of our portfolios for someone unfamiliar with investing?
Mohamed: Depending on a customer’s objectives and risk profile, they can allocate to either a growth, moderate, or conservative portfolio. Each portfolio is diversified into a multi-asset set of ETFs invested into global stocks, bonds, and alternative assets. The growth portfolio is most suitable for the more aggressive investment profile and dynamically allocates to 28 ETFs. The moderate portfolio adds allocation to US inflation-protected bonds in addition to the 28 ETFs, while the conservative portfolio doesn’t invest in highly volatile commodities. Each portfolio is reviewed regularly to ensure it meets its objectives.
4. Can you provide a brief highlight of what you’re developing for Save?
Mohamed: As I mentioned earlier, we are in the process of discussing a variety of new products, but in the short term, I am excited about adding our ESG portfolio to the investment options.
ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance and, when applied to creating portfolios, it means that asset managers like myself are focusing on:
- A company’s impact on the environment or the risks and opportunities associated with the impacts of climate change on the company, its business, and its industry.
- A company’s relationship with people and the society, or whether the company invests in its community.
- A company’s governance issues such as how the company is run and executive compensation.
The nature of our mission, which includes improving the planet, motivates us to include portfolios like this, along with our customers’ preferences. Many of our customers have asked if our portfolios focus on sustainable investing.
I’m happy to say that I’ll have a hand in developing Save’s ESG portfolio. This is just one way and we’re constantly evolving to meet our customers’ needs.
