Universal Trustee (M) Bhd is a company registered as a Trust Company under Section 4 of the Trust Companies Act 1949. They will act as custodian for holding your assets held in Malaysia.

A custodian is an entity that safeguards your assets, making sure that funds are used for their intended purpose.

You are the legal owner of all the money/assets in your account. Your assets will be put into “custodians” which are Securities Commission or foreign licensed entities, whose purpose is to  hold your assets on your behalf and to protect your ownership rights. Akru only has the Securities Commission licence to manage those assets and not legally own the assets. Your custodian will make Akru accountable for the assets that you own. Akru has no right to use your assets for our own benefit save for legally deducting our fees. If Akru goes belly up, Akru will never be able to run away with your assets which are held under custodian accounts. In such an unfortunate event, all your money, including any gains (or losses) so far from your investments will be returned to you.

We haven’t created an app at this point but you can visit our page Akrunow.com on your iOS or Android device and save the page to your home screen. At the Akru page, click the 3 dots on the top right corner and select “Add to Home Screen”. You would have created an icon on your home screen that works like an app. Touching this will lead you to Akru’s page which has been optimised for mobile devices.

We are very low-cost for the following reasons:

1. We don’t charge sales fees. Other products like unit trusts impose 3-6% of sales commissions every time you invest.

2. Management fees charged by our selected third-party ETFs are 0.04% to 0.5% p.a. Many unit trusts charge 1.5-2% p.a. management fees.

3. Fees charged by professional advisors to monitor your portfolio are usually about 1% p.a. of funds. Our pricing is tiered, starting at 0.7% p.a. and reducing to 0.2% p.a.

Other costs not charged:

4. We don’t pass brokerage commissions to you. Cost impact when typical funds buy and sell securities is between 0.1% and 0.3% per trade.

5. We don’t pass custodian fees to you. Cost impact on typical funds is 0.05% to 0.15% p.a.

6. We don’t pass remittance fees to you. Typical funds charge at cost

Other hidden costs you avoid with Akru:

7. We don’t over-trade your portfolio because we are passive investors. We only trade when you invest or withdraw and once a year during rebalancing. Our algorithms bake in minimisation of trades, FX conversion and remittances. The more trading a portfolio has, the higher the costs which lower returns over the long term.

8. We diversify more than typical funds with portfolios effectively holding thousands of securities. This will avoid costly losses from big or biggish bets that go wrong.

9. We don’t hold a lot of cash which doesn't earn much returns. With us, your funds are practically fully put to work save for small cash holding from which we deduct our fees. Some fund managers make big market directional bets (which can go either way) by cashing up substantially. 

10. Our ETFs track benchmarks/indexes very closely with very tiny errors. Typical funds are prone to underperforming benchmarks.

11. We give you a more precise portfolio that matches your preferred asset allocation, avoiding costly underinvestment or unbalanced allocations.

The digital investment management licence is a fund management licence granted by the Securities Commission of Malaysia, incorporating digital value propositions to portfolio management services.

Akru was founded by people with vast experience in investment banking, financial management and fintech. It is supported by an investment team with capital market licences from the Securities Commission as well as experienced investment advisors.

Akru Now Sdn Bhd (formerly known as Main Street Capital Sdn Bhd) is Akru's legal entity. Akru is a brand owned by Akru Now Sdn Bhd. Akru is licensed by the Securities Commission to operate a digital investment management platform.