Summit plans growth through acquisitions

TheAXAGroup has embarked on a major makeover of its flagship master trust,Summit, in an effort to entrench the investment platform as one of the largest master trusts in the country.

And the makeover is just the first step in a bid by AXA to expand its master trust business dramatically, a process that will push Summit down the path towards acquisitions.

The national manager of Summit, Annette King, has confirmed the group will look to buy out other master trust providers in order to become the third biggest platform provider in Australia within four years.

The moves come after a year when Summit grew by some 90 per cent to reach $4.5 billion in funds under administration, pushing it into fifth place on the platform provider league tables behind Asgard, Navigator, Flexiplan and BT’s wrap service.

The growth was in part due to the purchase of the Assure Services and Technology master trust, which AXA acquired along with the Monitor Money dealer group last November.

“Assure was the first but is unlikely to be the last. Make no mistake. We are number five in the portfolio administration market. I believe that within four year we will be a top three player,” King says.

The makeover of the Summit master trust will be headlined by a new pricing structure for financial advisers who use the platform.

The new pricing model, which comes into effect from June this year, will allow advisers who write significant volumes of business to the master trust to share in the platform’s profits.

AXA has also re-worked the client reporting tools of the platform, cut the minimum investment needed to join the master trust down to $1000 and will introduce a new online service, Quickplan, designed to allow advisers to write a rough financial plan for clients in under 15 minutes.

The changes to the master trust were made by AXA in response to feedback from both its own institutionally owned advisers and the growing list of independent advisers who use the platform.

AXA has doubled the number of independent advisers who use Summit to 138 over the last 12 months.

King says the independent adviser market will play an increasingly significant role in Summit’s attempt to increase its market share of the master trust market.

“We are about to rattle a few cages and it this spooks some of our competitors so be it,” she says.

She says Summit currently contributes 30 per cent of all new business that comes into the AXA group, but AXA is expecting this to increase to 50 per cent in the near future.