Ascot Lloyd: ‘We're looking at how we can invest in an adviser academy’

Last year, Ascot Lloyd was sold to Swedish private equity investor Nordic Capital for an undisclosed sum by its owner, Oaktree Capital Management.

Speaking to FTAdviser, Kerr said following the acquisition, the firm identified a number of areas that it wanted to prioritise over a five year period.

One of those is the investment in integration resources in the M&A resource.

“That's something that we're actually doing now because we see that as key to being able to deliver our plans as we need to have dedicated bodies that can support those with our M&A journey,” he said.

“We're also actioning around a client facing digital proposition to allow us to serve as more than the market.

“Historically we’ve been largely focused on a face to face, higher net worth individual and we want to be able to ensure that we're able to facilitate the whole of the market.”

The firm is investing in the proposition and in the short term, it is investing in the automation of the processes that it has in place.

This is to minimise a lot of manual work, for example, how they can use bots to gather data externally which is “the tedious part of the job”.

Kerr said: “Beyond that, we're looking at how we can invest in an adviser academy and grow that so we can bring in the next generation of advisers.

"We’re also looking at the regeneration around how we bring in and invest in external marketing leads, but those will come as part of the five year plan.”

Nordic Capital

Ascott Lloyd was bought by Oaktree back in 2017 and its latest sale to Nordic Capital completed in October.

The firm’s change of ownership sees Nordic Capital acquire the interests held by Ares Management Corporation, an investment manager which financed the IFA back in February 2021 for acquisitions.

Kerr said the actual process from the sale and competition was not too bad, however he said it was a bit strange to be owned by Oaktree but waiting for the deal to complete with Nordic. 

“It's strange, it's like you have split up with your ex but you've got a house together so you can't quite avoid seeing each other.

“We were starting to work with Nordic even before the deal completed. They don't really invest in what we're doing so we've been working with them around what the Nordic direction of that plan looks like.”

Kerr said Nordic wants the firm to establish themselves as the best acquiring firm out there.

“This means investing in the resources that we got to focus on delivering the M&A and more importantly to me, executing the M&A. This includes putting in dedicated integration resources to allow us to have the seamless journey that we want to have.

“But the main thing they said was continue to do what you're doing, [they just asked] how can we invest to make you better at that.

“That means continuing to grow organically and doing what we've been doing but on a larger scale, being better funded and better supported with internal resources.”

Kerr said a big part of this was investing internally to have a “leading edge” of being an IFA firm.

“It's not just about adding stuff on, it's about bringing them along that journey with us. For example, how can we build best practice processes, systems etc,” he said.

“There's been no change in terms of what we do from an M&A perspective because they don't have skin in the UK market. It's not like they own a platform saying how are we going to get all these assets onto this?”  

sonia.rach@ft.com 

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