St George takes stake in consolidator

St George has spent $10 million on a 7 per cent stake in burgeoning accounting and financial planning consolidator Stockford, valuing the group at nearly $150 million.

St George has spent $10 million on a 7 per cent stake in burgeoning accounting and financial planning consolidator Stockford, valuing the group at nearly $150 million.

St George has also placed a former senior executive from its Asgard master trust and Securitor and Pact financial planning businesses in charge of the group’s fi-nancial services operations. Mark Rantall has been working with Stockford execu-tives over the past few months in developing a management structure for the new business along with developing alliances for St George with other financial plan-ning groups. He will now hold the position as general manager of financial serv-ices.

Rantall says Stockford has about 50 financial planners spread throughout Australia, both in specialist financial panning practices and working as a part of accounting practices. Most of the advisers have come on board through acquisitions by Stock-ford over the past 18 months.

Stockford is looking to aggressively build adviser numbers and funds under advice in the near future. Rantall says the group currently has $1.5 billion under advice and will look to grow to $5 billion under advice within three years. Revenue from its financial planning and accounting operations was $97 million in the past year.

Stockford will list on the Australian Stock Exchange in early November and ex-pects to have a prospectus on the market by next week. Under the terms of the deal announced today, St George has the opportunity to raise its stake to 10 per cent. Other institutional investors are looking to take significant stakes in the group, ac-cording to Rantall.

St George financial services general manager Richard Cawsey will take a chair on the board of Stockford.