High profile industry figure Kevin Wyld has answered the knockers of the Beacon master trust he developed, by announcing the administration platform had reached $100 million under management.
Wyld says the first $50 million was the hardest but the last $50 million has come in the past three months. He has forecast inflows of $18 million for this month, almost double the budgeted amount.
Wyld says there were a number of people in the industry who had said “he won’t last”.
“I’ve well and truly served my apprenticeship,” he says. “We’ve gone through the early pain that every business goes through when it starts out and now we are running hot.”
“I never doubted the success of the business. It is really a no-brainer for advisers — it is only a matter of getting the message through to advisers with the limited resources of a small company.”
There are now 16 dealer groups which use the system and the number of advisers within those groups putting money through Beacon is increasing daily, Wyld says. Most of the advisers are from smaller dealer groups, however, an increasing number of from groups with about 30 advisers.
He attributes the success of the past six months to the realisation by advisers that Beacon is “a business with real value”.
“Advisers love the equity deal. If they have $10 million of their client’s money in the fund, that equates to a capital value of about $390,000.”
Advisers have been allocated a 65 per cent share in Beacon, while the remaining 35 per cent is broken up between Wyld who holds 5 per cent and Tower who owns 30 per cent. Most of the adviser allocation is yet to be issued.
Wyld is probably best known as the head of the Bain financial planning and master trust group which he headed up between 1984 and 1998, before heading up the Financial Wisdom dealer group. Deutsche Bank bought Bain in 1991 and renamed the master trust as part of Deutsche Funds Management before renaming the dealer group to Deutsche Financial Planning in 1998.
Wyld was one of the pioneers of the master trust movement when Bain developed a master trust in 1988, at about the same time as Asgard, MLC and AM Corporation.
