PENSIONS and investment giant Standard Life has vowed it will not change course after it felt the impact of market turmoil in its last quarter.
The Edinburgh-based company missed sales growth expectations yesterday, blaming the shortfall in part on corporate pension fund trustees deciding to delay any switching until markets calm down.
Standard Life reported new business sales of £15.5 billion for the nine months to the end of September, some £400m behind market expectations.
However, while assets under administration fell from £200bn at the end of June to £191.1bn, this was still ahead of what the City had anticipated.
Finance director Jackie Hunt told The Herald: “Nothing has happened that would change our view about the attractiveness of the UK market.”
Standard Life chief executive David Nish, who received a £1.97m pay package last year, has faced criticism for ploughing some £200m a year into systems to help the company benefit from UK market changes such as pensions auto-enrolment and a ban on commission payments to advisers due to come into force in the next few years.
Meanwhile, rivals such as Prudential have upped dividend payouts and looked to fast-growing regions such as Asia for future growth.
Ms Hunt said market turmoil, on concerns about eurozone sovereign debt, are similar to those at the height of the financial crisis.
She said: “What we have seen over the last quarter is a lot of volatility in the markets and times when liquidity has been pretty scarce, conditions similar to those in 2008.”
This had led to investors making big changes to their asset allocations.
But she argued that 175-year-old Standard Life’s breadth of products, and offerings such as its wrap platform that allows advisers to manage client portfolios, meant it could keep hold of assets even as market conditions change.
Ms Hunt noted that corporate pension schemes had been particularly reticent about making big changes.
“Corporate pensions have seen a slow down. Some pension fund trustees decide not to move assets at a time of high volatility. They don’t want to be out of the market for too long. The strong growth in the first half of the year slowed in the third quarter.”
But she added : “Some of the structural and regulatory changes such as auto-enrolment come in in 2012. While people can afford to wait a little now, there will be a time when, even if conditions remain volatile, they will have to take a decision.”
Duncan Russell, analyst at JP Morgan Cazenove said: “Overall assets under management proved more resilient to markets than we had anticipated but sales less resilient.
“Nonetheless, there remains in our view evidence that Standard Life is capitalising on the significant structural changes taking place in the UK market: while quarterly progress is unsurprisingly volatile, the medium-term drivers remain in place.”
Shares closed down 0.1p at 205.9p, a drop of 0.05%.
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