Advance restructure complete: Lloyd

Geoff Lloyd

St George Bank wealth management general manager Geoff Lloyd said the retrenchment of 10 staff from Advance Asset Management yesterday marks the end of the organisation’s restructure of its wealth management business.

According to Lloyd, the bank put in place a 90-day restructuring plan back in August when the wealth management arm was united under one management team.

“In that 90-day plan we set out to identify where we had common customers, common customer insights, and common strategies across wealth, not just within Advance and Asgard, but across centres of excellence like product, marketing and distribution,” Lloyd said.

“We were able to do that and we’ve done some product initiatives basically around putting third-party margin lending onto the Asgard platform. The announcements we made yesterday were across those three centres of excellence of marketing, product, and distribution,” he explained.

Lloyd said the group did look for redeployment opportunities where possible but was not able to provide everyone with a new role.

“For us it is a little over 10 people out of 1,000 across wealth management so this isn’t significant by any measure,” Lloyd surmised.

The restructuring of the wealth managing business began back in August with the departure of then managing director of Advance Kate Mulligan.

At the time three new appointments were also made with Dean Thomas becoming head of product, Bettina Pidcock becoming head of marketing, and Wayne Wilson becoming head of distribution.

“For the Advance business we think that it is still very much a strong growth opportunity. It’s got an excellent brand, great partner relationships, and the multi-manager funds’ performance . . . has been stellar over the last three years,” Lloyd said.