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 Insider, hosts Maja Garaca Djurdjevic and Keith Ford take a look at the Reserve Bank’s latest rate cut call, the factors influencing the unanimous decision, and what economists expect from the rest of the year.
In this episode of Relative Return Insider, host Keith Ford is joined by Accountants Daily journalist Imogen Wilson to take a look at why there has been such broad support for a more comprehensive tax reform discussion at the Treasurer’s economic roundtable.
In this week’s episode of Relative Return Insider, AMP chief economist Shane Oliver joins the show to discuss Australia’s stagnating productivity ahead of the government’s economic reform roundtable, and how picking all the “low-hanging fruit” for reform in the ’90s helped kick off a surge that has since stalled out.
In this episode of Relative Return Insider, host Keith Ford is joined by Cyber Daily deputy editor David Hollingworth to take you inside the evolving landscape of cyber crime, how even huge companies can be at risk of breaches, and what that means for anyone trying to understand the risks.
