Quilter has reported it will pay £221m to shareholders from the proceeds of its single strategy business sale, its interim results for the six months to June reveal. It will be paid through a special interim dividend of 12 pence per share.
The spin-out of the single-strategy business, led by Richard Buxton, and private equity firm TA Associates, completed in June for £583m. Buxton has since announced the firm will be renamed Merian Global Investors.
Quilter Investors is now responsible for multi-asset strategies.
However, the results revealed that discretionary fund manager, Quilter Cheviot, experienced high staff turnover in the relatively short period since the company listed in June.
Chief executive Paul Feeney (pictured) has said this may lead to “higher than trend outflows” in 12 to 18 months’ time.
It has seen 12 investment managers resign since the June listing on the London Stock Exchange. In the last year it has employed nine new investment managers.
Quilter Investors performance falters
Assets under management rose 2% to £116.5bn from £114.4bn in its 2017 full year results. Positive net flows of £2.2bn were marginally offset by a weaker overall market performance of £100m.
Quilter said it has delivered good medium and long-term investment performance, with discretionary and multi-asset funds performing well against customer targets and meeting the relevant target outcome.
However, in the short-term, performance in the multi asset range has been held back.
A spokesperson at Quilter said: “We are an active manager running solutions in line with the advice process and customer needs, focussing on medium and long term investment performance.
“As an active manager we can and do deviate from simple benchmarks where we believe this is more likely to produce beneficial outcomes and performance can therefore, over short periods of time, differ from peers.”
The results revealed the restricted channel within Quilter Financial Planning accounted for £600m (29%) of Quilter Wealth Solutions net inflows in 2018 and £1.4bn (78%) of net flows into Quilter Investors in 2018, principally into the Cirilium and Generation fund ranges.
Quilter board appointments
In a separate announcement, Quilter said it has appointed Paul Matthews and Suresh Kana as independent non-executive directors of the Company, effective today.
Matthews, the former chief executive of Standard Life Wealth has also been appointed as a non-executive director of Intrinsic Financial Services, a subsidiary of the company, with effect from the same date.
Kana is a veteran of PwC, most recently as chief executive officer and territory senior partner of PwC Africa.
Quilter shares rose 2.3% during early trading.
