Strong investment performance at FCAM

Fund manager F&C Asset Management saw a chunky outflow of funds from its Strategic Partner business in the third quarter, as Friends Life continued to pull out money.

Overall, assets under management (AUM) fell by £1.4bn during the quarter to £96.8bn, with the group seeing a net outflow of £3.69bn of funds, which outweighed positive investment performance of £3.2bn.

AUM in the Strategic Partner business fell from £62.0bn at the start of the quarter to £60.0bn at September 30th, largely as a result of a net outflow of £3.8bn in funds, which more than wiped out a positive investment performance of £2.4bn.

The outflow won't have come as a big surprise, as the group had indicated in the previous quarter that it had received notice of withdrawals of £5.1bn by Friends Life, and some £2.9bn of these withdrawals were made in the third quarter. F&C expects most of the remaining £2.4bn to be withdrawn during the final quarter of 2012.

The Third Party institutional business saw net inflows of £401m in the quarter, which helped boost AUM to £24.68bn from £24.11bn. At the end of the quarter won but unfunded Third-Party Institutional mandates were £1.5bn and notified withdrawals were £0.1bn, resulting in a net pipeline of £1.4bn, down from £1.6bn at the end of June.

"Inflows and performance in our Third-Party Institutional business continue to be encouraging as we implement the strategies set out in our Strategic Review last October," said Edward Bramson, Executive Chairman of F&C Asset Management.

"We have now put in place a new management structure to implement the consumer strategy set out earlier this year. We currently anticipate initial revenues from our refocused direct-to-consumer marketing approach will occur in the first half of 2013 and look forward to growing our presence in this area," Bramson added.

JH