AegonAug 12 2021

Aegon UK sees assets reach record £200bn

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 Aegon UK sees assets reach record £200bn

Aegon’s assets under administration in the UK reached £200bn for the first time despite seeing £78m of net outflows from its retail arm.

According to the provider’s results for the second quarter of 2020, published this morning (August 12), this growth in assets was due to stronger markets and a number of ongoing investments within the business as it looks to grow its UK pension and savings arm.

Aegon’s platform business doubled its net deposits compared with the same quarter last year to £1bn, driven by its workplace arm. 

The provider said that by growing its platform business and reducing expenses, it aims to reduce the impact from the gradual run-off of its traditional product portfolio. This is the main driver behind revenue lost on net deposits for the second quarter. 

Net inflows in its workplace business came to £1.1bn in the second quarter of 2021, which is almost double the amount seen in the second quarter of last year.

But in the retail sector net outflows were £78m, with Aegon saying that both inflows and outflows increased from more customer activity due to “an improved Covid-19 environment”. 

Operating profit increased by 16 per cent compared with Q2 2020 to reach £38m.

Aegon stated: “Higher fee revenues from the growth of the platform business and favorable equity markets, along with lower expenses, more than offset the impacts from the loss of earnings due to the sale of Stonebridge and the gradual run-off of the traditional product portfolio.”

Aegon said it will continue to invest in its workplace proposition, with an example of this being its recent purchase of Pension Geeks.

From this Aegon expects to personalise communications to clients and drive growth.

Last month, Aegon told FTAdviser that its platform migration issues were in the past as 100 advice firms joined in the past year and existing firms returned to post service levels.

Ronnie Taylor, chief distribution officer at Aegon, said a number of firms left the platform as a result of the migration disruption but the more common response of advisers was to reduce the extent to which they used the Aegon platform over other providers. 

Now, he said, many of these firms were choosing to work more closely with Aegon again and in addition it has added about “100 new, significant firms over the last year or so”.

Aegon currently has about 1,000 firms that are actively managed out of about 6,000 advice firms which have assets on the platform.

Aegon bought the Cofunds platform in August 2016 but its later attempt to replatform resulted in a wide range of issues, with clients unable to access basic functions on the site for months. 

By June 2018 efforts to solve the issues had cost the company an additional £3m.

amy.austin@ft.com

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