It was an eye-catching announcement too, with the company’s chief executive Adrian Grace describing the year as “game changing.”
Overall, the company reported record platform growth, up by £7 billion during 2016. Its quarterly earnings stood at £18.6 million with protection asset sales growing by 11%.
For the company’s chief executive Adrian Grace, 2016 was a breakthrough year particularly on the back of the firm’s deal to buy Cofunds and its acquisition of BlackRock’s defined contribution platform.
“A combination of factors including the pension freedoms, investment uncertainty and an increased demand for advice on transfers from defined benefit schemes is creating strong demand for financial advice,” he said in a statement issued to Insurance Business.
“Against this backdrop our goal is to help advisers and other intermediaries meet this demand by offering the best tools and service and by not competing for distribution, we believe we’ll be successful.”
Going forward, Grace outlined the opportunities that await related to upgrading the platform.
“We’ve already had productive discussions with users of both Cofunds’ and Aegon’s platforms via our advisory board and recently launched an Adviser Panel to gather feedback from a wider group,” he explained. “It’s encouraging that our plans to combine the best of Aegon and Cofunds have been well received.
“At the next advisory board meeting in March we’ll outline a roadmap detailing further information on timings for our technology upgrade approach. This will focus on extending functionality to both sets of users through an enhanced version of the Aegon platform which is under development. Cofunds users will benefit from a reduction in paper and an integrated pension, for example, while Aegon users will benefit from features like pre-funding and debit card transactions.”
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