The chief executive of Aegon UK has ruled out further redundancies.
When Adrian Grace arrived at the firm in 2009, it employed 5,000 staff. Having shed nearly 3,000 workers during the subsequent process of digitisation, the company is now able to build for the future, said Mr Grace.
He said: “Whether you are in banking, groceries or insurance – your industry has been impacted by the digital world. Clearly the more you digitise, and the more you automate, the fewer people you need. Do I think we have now got a hard core in terms of size and scale that we need to now build from? Yes I do.
“I do not have any plans for any more redundancy programmes but I do have plans to build and scale up the business.”
Mr Grace said that Origen Financial Services, the adviser network owned by Aegon UK, had a safe future within his company, despite last October’s announcement of its 2013 pre-tax losses doubling to £5.6m.
Mr Grace said: “When I came into the group I inherited businesses which I have since got rid of, and others which I have held onto because I have not had the right offer. That does not mean I am going to sell Origen, but it operates independently of Aegon UK, and has a clear strategy, so I spend less than 1 per cent of my time thinking about it.
“When you are chief executive you deal with the biggest problems, and Origen is not a big red flashing light at the moment.”
In June Aegon is set to launch a form of variable annuities on its Arc platform. These products are already popular in the US, where Aegon sells US$7bn (£4.7bn) worth of them a year. They give the customer a secure income while the pot remains invested. Mr Grace distinguished between Aegon’s products and other providers’ annuities which have a bad reputation.
He said: “The only similarity between an annuity and a third-way product is that they can provide a guaranteed income for life. We are not going to call ours an annuity product.”
Adviser view
Bob Wilson, director of Norwich-based GreenSky Wealth, said: “On the whole I do not have problems with Aegon UK, and I am definitely interested to see what its variable annuities will look like.”
