St James’s Place has revealed it is targeting a push into the overseas expat advice market with plans to acquire a 50-strong intermediary business based out in Asia.
The chief executive of the London-based wealth management company said it was going through three different regulatory processes to acquire the Henley Group, a firm operating out of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore.
He said: “The Henley Group has 50 professional advisers advising the expat market over there, with 4,000 clients and millions of assets under management.
“However, there are estimated 120,000 expats operating in those jurisdictions with billions of investible assets and the market is big - the group currently has about 3 per cent of the market share in that region.”
Antony Michell, chief executive of the Henley Group, will be the “lead player” for SJP in its “international aspiration”.
The deal is expected within weeks, Mr Bellamy said, certainly by the end of the first half of this year.
He said there may be plans to go outside of Asia to the Middle East, such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but it was definitely “first things first” and the Asian operation would be bedded down for the next couple of years before SJP reaches out to other expatriate markets.
He added: “We will take our fund proposition and product wrapper, replicating what we do in the UK and these are English advisers, servicing British passports holders who are serving on expatriate contracts in these jurisictions. This is just an international extention of our business.”
His comments came as the FTSE 250-listed company announced its annual results for 2013.
Net inflow of funds under management grew from in £3.35bn 2012 to £4.3bn in 2013, while profits net of tax rose from £459.7m to £674.5m over the timeframe.
As a result of this growth, Mr Bellamy said the board of SJP is proposing a final dividend of 9.58 pence per share, taking the total dividend for the year to 15.96p per share, up 50 per cent on 2012.
However, the distribution business loss for the year was £6.1m, compared with a profit in 2012 of £5.3m, which the results attributed to higher expenses in 2013 associated with the strong increase in partner numbers, up 9.5 per cent in the period.
Other operations contributed a loss of £27.7m, compared with a 2012 loss of £15.9m. This included £8.1m in development costs related to SJP’s back-office infrastructure project and regulatory change, and the £6.2m reduction in Lloyds Banking Group’s shareholding on 11 March 2013, among other expenses.
