The SJP chief executive Andrew Croft has made a bullish speech about the future of the company to advisers at its annual, but of course, virtual conference.
The firm has cut the dividend by a third and seen shares fall by as much as a third, but Croft says the firm will perform better than others in the sector as it did post the financial crisis.
Generally bigger firms do tend to come out of crises in a stronger position so it will be one to watch.
The number of finance firm failures has fallen in the first three months of 2020 and is 29% lower than the first three months of 2019 according to research by Citywire.
Obviously, we can’t see how many IFAs this involves but it is certainly interesting and positive given the lockdown.
A quarter of trustees have suspended pension transfers as the Pensions Regulator allowed.
Investors were pulling £9m a day from Mark Barnett’s funds prior to his departure from the Invesco Perpetual according to Morningstar.
Peter Selby, managing director of Punter Southall Aspire is very concerned about pension withdrawal rates reaching 8 per cent, an obviously unsustainable level.
Writing in the Financial Times, Merryn Somerset Webb says that woes of Mr Barnett and his predecessor Neil Woodford have not completely undermined the case for active fund management pointing to research that shows outperformance in the UK, Europe and Japan over 20 years.
Nexus IFA's Kerry Nelson, writing in Professional Adviser, says that more need to be done to stop fraudsters and scammers and calls for the FCA to look at producing a discussion paper leading to a programme of work to reduce the number of scams.
The chief executive of the PFS Keith Richards has called on the Government to allow advisers a 4-month break from their PI obligations.
