Standard bids to win back clients with new funds

Standard Life Ireland this week launched a suite of 38 new investment funds in a bid to reverse a recent disastrous decline in its popularity among investors, which saw new business sales in 2004 slump by 30 per cent to €43.2 million.

There was more bad news earlier this week, as chief executive Sandy Crombie told the agm that the company's first-quarter insurance sales in the Republic had fallen by a further 25 per cent.

Mr Crombie also apologised to the Irish people for labelling a potentially confusing change in its reporting calendar as "Irish". Mr Crombie told an Edinburgh audience that a switch to year- end reporting from mid-November made 2004 a 13-and-a-half-month year, "if that doesn't seem too Irish".

The mutual life and pensions company, which plans to vote to demutualise next year, is currently trying to improve its image among the Irish broker community, where it is viewed as old-fashioned and too heavily dependent on investment policies known as "with-profits" - policies that combine investment with protection, where policyholders are entitled to a share of the profits made by the insurer. Profits are usually added to the policy annually.

These policies have fallen heavily out of favour among financial advisers. As a result, Standard Life Ireland's share of the life and pensions market has slipped to less than 4 per cent.

Michael Leahy, the chief executive of Standard Life Ireland, said the company was expecting a "significant" increase in sales in the order of 25-30 per cent in 2005 in order to counter last year's dramatic dip. "Next year we are hoping to add to that," he said.

Mr Leahy said the UK and Irish markets were behind the US and Australia in terms of their approach to product selection.

"What we're trying to do is catch up internationally ahead of our competitors," he said.

"The market for with-profits business is smaller than it was. We are very much repositioning ourselves and taking a more holistic approach so that we are less dependent on with-profits."

Over 70,000 of the 90,000 Irish members who are eligible to vote for demutualisation hold with-profits policies and have faced repeated cuts in their annual bonuses and maturity values in recent years.

The company's new range of products, known as Synergy, includes multi-manager funds where the "best of breed" managers for various investment styles, assets and global markets are selected and monitored by a US consultancy firm, Wilshire Associates.

Standard Life Ireland has invested €350 million with Wilshire in order to open the door to individual investors. Standard Life's minimum investment requirement of €10,000 means its multi-manager funds are the first in the Republic to be widely accessible to small investors.

The new suite of funds, which also include index-tracking funds and funds managed by third parties, are available now to Approved Retirement Fund customers and single-premium bond investors and will be extended to all personal pension products from the summer.