Skandia will rename the Selestia platform to Skandia Investment Solutions and develop it into Skandia’s wealth management, or full wrap, platform.
The early conclusion of the planning team set up recently to evaluate Skandia’s wealth management, or full wrap, proposition has concluded that Skandia Investment Solutions should be the basis of this proposition and therefore its full wrap proposition will be a natural extension of its current platform offering. It also concluded that some financial advisers may require a white labelled platform solution ‘powered by Skandia’ and Skandia will work with these advisers to meet this demand.
The name change follows feedback from advisers that the Skandia name is the right one for these services in the adviser marketplace. The planning team will continue to now establish timelines, service and functionality requirements for this.
Skandia Investment Solutions will sit alongside the Skandia Life platform which continues to offer advisers open architecture life and pensions products. Combined, these two platforms have significant scale with over 40 billion funds under management and are profitable, enabling investment into the development of future services. This gives Skandia a substantial competitive advantage over other platforms.
Skandia’s combined proposition offers advisers a ‘no regret’ sale. Skandia Investment Solutions and Skandia Life will offer two different charging and remuneration options to suit the vast majority of adviser and client needs.
“Investment platforms will play an increasingly important role within the industry and we are committed to developing our proposition in line with the needs of financial advisers and their clients,” says Nick Poyntz-Wright, chief executive of Skandia UK, who will head up both the Skandia Investment Solutions and Skandia Life platforms. “Aligning the brands of all our UK businesses is an important step in delivering a simple, integrated proposition for advisers and our decision to white label our platform for advisers shows our commitment to putting them in pole position. Our overall market proposition provides advisers and their clients with choice, flexibility and support and we will continue to evolve this in line with their changing requirements.”