NEXT and WAS don’t go well in the same sentence. Can Aegon really go anywhere but “legacy”?
There are two matters in my mind. The first is how this impacts on Aegon’s clients. Aegon is what became of Scottish Equitable which was , for a while, a very reputable life company in the IFA market. It paid high for its business and IFA’s loved getting up to 150% of Lautro, but it was not to last. Aegon took on the mutual and Aegon has never quite made it in any private pension market. It is not an oh so fashionable bulk annuity or retail pension provider.
It has a master trust but is neither quite there in workplace pensions and will have to eat its personal pensions to get fat enough to make the 2030 and 2035 cuts as Aegon is not winning employers to it as an occupational muti-employer provider. Aegon has disparaged CDC following a bad time with the Dutch version. In short I cannot see Aegon doesn’t have a legacy that clients can reach out to, the glory days of Scottish Equitable are over and no replacement has been found.
The second worry I have for Aegon is , as Gordon Aiken is pointing out, the life company has some very much more dynamic competitors. Lloyds Bank is clearly going to support the lame duck of a master trust it owns with Scottish Widows. Forcing the Lloyds Bank Staff work pension into its arms without much glee from what I can see from Lloyd’s Bank staff. All the same , it will give Scottish Widows some relevance as a master trust and with Scottish Widows having a huge book of legacy personal pensions, they will not have problems with scale- not with an override at their disposal to move personal pension pots into the master trust.
As for Standard Life and Phoenix, this is a business that appears a bit skint at present but it is the only one to have the capacity to write annuity business. To Standard Life, Aegon will look a legacy business as it moves forward on many fronts, I’m not so sure it’s got the appetite for more of Britain and especially Scotland’s heritage but as mentioned above, it is very good at it.
Is Aegon really the prize I grew up when I started out in the 1980s? What has happened to see it hung out to dry by a company to be named in future TransAmerica?
Are Aegon’s top staff going to hang about a company that has made it known it wants to receive offers by February of next year? The investment business is not coming with the life company and this does not sound a happy company to be travelling with.
