The £140 million was a rough estimate of the total ‘platform’ market consisting of pure wrap, fund supermarkets, SIPP and life companies offering large investment choices – often several hundred funds, and was to be compared with the total retail investment market estimate (all life cos, mutual funds, retail stock market, SIPP etc) which is several trillion pounds.
Skandia Life started the latter in 1984 and has been much copied since. Before the Selestia merger they had (from memory) circa £25 billion, now a bit more or maybe the same owing to asset market value shrinkage. The 2 big fund supermarkets arrived in 2000 just after Transact launched, both new concepts at the time. Fidelity and Cofunds have similar levels of assets approaching £15 billion each I believe with Cofunds just the bigger of the two. Both have marketing budgets several hundred times greater than Transact and also much simpler propositions which largely explains the difference in accumulated funds.
Of the ‘proper’ Wraps, Transact was the largest at £5.8 billion late summer and with inflows of about £100 million per month, despite market falls will now be above £6 billion. Standard Life is heading towards £5 bn I understand, NU has about £3 bn (although still closed to new business), Abbey/James Hay/Santander claim £11 bn but that includes the SIPP which existed at the same level before the wrap was launched so the guess is they have little on the wrap. Nucleus and Ascentric are smaller players with a couple of billion between them.
£140 bn is still a reasonable estimate for this lot added up, most of it being Skandia and other life companies copying the ‘hundreds of funds’ approach which is itself now approaching legacy status although really only became firmly established in the mid 90’s (i.e just over 10 years).
Assets are also cascading down this chain from Skandia like propositions to fund supermarkets and then ‘full monty’ (unbundled pricing and full open architecture investment choice) SIPPs and Wrap like Transact.
