New life for
It now looks as if Old Mutual has not been able to sell the remnants of its Skandia business. This operation will soon be dual-listed on the JSE and in London, provisionally as Old Mutual Wealth. But suspect it will later change its name. Old Mutual didn’t cover itself in glory in its 18 years in London. Top management, under Mike Levett, could easily have opted to work from Hook in Hampshire, where it already owned a small asset manager. But instead their egos prevailed and they opted for highprofile digs in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, in Central London.
I won’t catalogue all the company’s acquisitions after that. I supported some, but then I didn’t appreciate how capital hungry they would be. I am sure there is no such thing as a silver-tongued actuary, but Jim Sutcliffe in his time as Mutual boss came close.
It makes no sense for Old Mutual Wealth UK to keep the Old Mutual brand once the SA operation regains its independence. I suppose going back to the Skandia brand is out of the question, unless Skandia agrees to buy the business back. So maybe it should drop the “Old” for “New”. New Street Investments might work, or even calling the whole thing Quilter Cheviot (QC), after its stuffiest, most upper-class unit.
Old Mutual Wealth CEO Paul Feeney is too much of a hard-working stiff to be the typical QC client, but most people agree he has done a great job pulling together some disparate businesses. I felt outraged that Old Mutual paid twice as much for QC as it had budgeted for its expansion into Africa over the next decade. Isn’t at least part of its mission to do good for the less fortunate?
But, realistically, there is a halo effect from owning a high-prestige business. Old Mutual needs to buy a similar highnet-worth wealth manager in SA, where its business, also branded Old Mutual Wealth, should be called Old Mutual Just About Comfortably Off.
Feeney’s strategy is working — even the permanent embarrassment of the platform back office seems to be getting resolved. Old Mutual hired Standard Bank’s Steve Braudo to bring in some sanity; he fished into the alphabet soup and entrusted the job to a crowd called FNZ. The previous contractors were IFDS and DST. Do these companies get chosen from a Scrabble board?
Feeney has shown that there can be cross-selling between Wealth’s business units. It has a respectable asset management wing in Old Mutual Global
Performance fees provide a big chunk of revenue for the Wealth business, but there has been backlash against them from clients