Trust Company tipped to lift Perpetual’s advice business
Perpetual is counting on the acquisition of the Trust Company to drive growth to its advice business, which has experienced “headwinds” due to a lack of confidence across the market.
Earlier in the week, Perpetual announced a 37 per cent increase in underlying profit after tax of $48.1 million for the half year to 31 December, 2013.
Perpetual Private’s profit before tax was up 11 per cent on the same period last year to $4.9 million, which CEO Geoff Lloyd said he was “happy with” given the lower total market flows.
“I think personally that high net worths are still in a lot of cash, but we haven’t been waiting for their confidence to return, we’ve been working on the business model - the foundations, the platform, the service model and the team that we need to better leverage that.”
Lloyd said the acquisition of the Trust Company - which was finalised in December last year - would bring “significant extra scale” to Perpetual Private, with an extra 50 per cent in funds under advice.
When asked how long it would take for Perpetual’s advice business to see the benefits of the merged client base, Lloyd said it could be up to 18 months.
“It takes longer in an advice business, because one of the drivers of it is the platform migration of clients through a number of their platforms to our one new platform, which we put in place last year,” he said.
Lloyd said while the company was always on the lookout for new talent, there would be no rush to hire new planners in 2014.
“We think we can take on more clients without more planners ¨ that’s because a lot of the work that we’ve done has freed up admin and capacity for greater productivity in our current planning force.”
Recommended for you
In this week’s episode of Relative Return Unplugged, AMP chief economist Shane Oliver joins the show to unravel the web of tariffs that US President Donald Trump launched on trading partners and take a look at the way global economies are likely to be impacted.
In this episode of Relative Return, host Laura Dew is joined by Andrew Lockhart, managing partner at Metrics Credit Partners, to discuss the attraction of real estate debt and why it can be a compelling option for portfolio diversification.
In this week’s episode of Relative Return Unplugged, AMP’s chief economist, Shane Oliver, joins us to break down Labor’s budget, focusing on its re-election strategy and cost-of-living support, and cautioning about the long-term impact of structural deficits, increased government spending, and potential risks to productivity growth.
In this episode of Relative Return, host Laura Dew chats with Mark Barnes, head of investment research, and Catherine Yoshimoto, director of product management, from FTSE Russell about markets in Donald Trump's second presidency and how US small caps are faring compared to their large-caps counterpart.
