Last month Your Money’s sister title Investment Week revealed Hargreaves had contacted groups with plans to reduce its high-profile Wealth 150 fund list down to as low as 30 funds, in a bid to stimulate competition for places.

However, Hargreaves is also exploring other business models, and is planning on increasing the number of funds which are only available to its own customers. Currently it has just one index tracker which it can exclusively offer to clients.

“What we are saying to the fund groups is we want them to put their best foot forward in terms of price,” said head of advice Danny Cox. “They might achieve that in a number of ways. It might be super-clean share classes [and] we are also open to the idea of exclusive deals.”

The firm’s Vantage platform currently offers the SWIP UK Foundation Growth fund as an exclusive, and this is currently the platform’s most popular tracker.

Further deals were possible, including on active funds, Cox said, though most would be on a limited time period.

“What tends to happen with exclusive deals is you get them for six to twelve months before they are offered to the wider market,” he said.

Other platforms are also trying similar strategies. Skandia has already announced a series of segregated mandates as part of its Select fund panel.

Exclusive deals were an issue the platform said it would “look into further,” according to platform marketing manager Michael Barratt, but he said they would be unlikely to be on active funds outside the group.

“There is a difference between Old Mutual Managed being made available only on the Skandia platform versus Invesco Perpetual High Income,” he said.