Assirt staff to survive S&P sale

Standard and Poor’s (S&P) has pledged to keep the majority of Assirt staff, as well as maintain the Assirt brand, after it ended month’s of speculation by agreeing to buy the research house from the St George Bank yesterday.

S&P Australia managing director Chris Dalton told Money Management directly after the deal was announced to Assirt staff yesterday afternoon that the Assirt brand would remain for up to two years.

“We believe we will maintain the Assirt name for a period of time and we will then consult the market as to whether we would migrate the services over to the S&P brand but we understand that the Assirt name is well established and has a rich history in the market,” Dalton said.

He said S&P would review the fund ratings process used by Assirt, but that no major changes were anticipated in the short term.

The deal between the two group, which involves the managed fund data and research parts of the Assirt business, ended the ongoing speculation about the future of Assirt within the St George bank.

The research house has had an unsettled history within St George since the bank acquired the business with its purchase of Sealcorp in the late 1990s. It was initially spun out to operate in a separate business entity to Sealcorp, before being wound back into the group. In 2003, the research house was taken out of the Sealcorp fold for a second time to operate under the St George bank’s own investments and insurance arm.

While the terms of the sale are not being disclosed, St George’s wealth management divisions, including Sealcorp and the Securitor dealer group, will take research and fund ratings from S&P as part of the arrangement between the two groups.

Assirt’s financial planning software business is not part of the sale and will stay with St George.

Dalton said it was expected there would be minimal redundancies amongst Assirt staff.

“We will be meeting with staff over the next couple of days and looking at their roles and what we are going to bring across to S&P and I am not anticipating many redundancies as a result of any overlap,” he said.

“We don’t currently have a data operations business in Australia, so we expect to pick up that team.

“We don’t currently undertake investment consulting services so we will pick up those people as well.

“And we think the ratings staff and the research staff will compliment the small team that we have maintained so we think that there will be minimal redundancies.”