Life assurer Standard Life (SL.) delivered a solid first-quarter performance: assets under management rose 1.5 per cent in the first three months to £248bn, driven by net inflows of £2.4bn.
Admittedly, since chancellor George Osborne's decision to scrap compulsory annuity purchases, Standard's UK annuity sales have fallen about 50 per cent. But as the group generated only about 9 per cent of 2013 operating profit from new annuity sales, that's hardly disastrous. More importantly, Standard is the largest player in the self-invested personal pension (Sipp) and drawdown market, making it among the best-placed to benefit from the move among retirees to seek alternative products.
Pension auto-enrolment is another big opportunity for the group and, in 2013, a third of FTSE 350 companies had established schemes with Standard in order to meet their obligations here. Its highly automated approach to offering the product should keep costs sufficiently low enough to allow for decent margins. What's more, March's acquisition of Ignis Asset Management will also boost Standard's prospects as a third-party asset manager.
