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02/10/18
07:03
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Originally posted by Leveraged
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This ship has a rotten hull, perpetuated over years of mis-guided management and exec failure and their inability to see the inevitable demise of the “clipping the ticket” strategy. This has gone on in all the old life companies with AMP being now the last man standing.
You don’t have to look far back to when they were still joyfully selling Whole of Life Policies as “tax-free savings plans”, as were the rest of the industry, or creating financial abominations of packaged term and savings plans all designed to bring massive windfalls to the manufacturer. Who knows how many disappointed children and parents there are who on their 21st birthdays went to cash in their Whole of Life policies which were often sold as tax free savings plans with free insurance and taken out for their kids education and as a head start in life. For their efforts, the parents and recipients received at best their money back (after 21 years!!).
The reason for this story - this is this part of the industries pedigree and was their bread and buttter before being outlawed (industry and world wide - the deceit was finally ended and in the UK by way of example the regulator fortunately went much deeper in its regulations and is somewhat of a blueprint for AU).
As we have seen from the Royal Commision the apple has not fallen very much further (nothing but arrogant greed).
IMO there are large proportions of AMP’s advisers desperate to leave their clutches - unfortunately still bound by their unconscionable agency agreements. It will be interesting to see if they can retain this last tentacle of control over their “tied” distribution force with vertical distribution models now in question. Surely their BOLR’s (Buyer of Last Resort) program for their advisers will be hugely affected if not wiped out, decimating millions from their advisers flawed valuation multiples. (The model is a symbiotic relationship between the amount of “in-house product” sold and the valuation multiple - independence personified heh!!) It is surprising this was not singled out at the RC but remains another elephant in the room.
Without BOLR’s there appears very little to keep the sheep together other than an indefensible agency agreement IMO. It will be interesting to see if they continue to apply egregious tactics to thwart this potential mass exodus.
Times are a changing for this old ship - and it is not a hull I would want to be on in the new seas of change that lie before it. Best of luck to all passengers and crew. As for analysts reports - maybe they should dig a little deeper before making such wishful predictions - how many leopards have you seen that have changed their spots (in any industry) ? This business doesn’t need to pivot - it needs to completely transform and this requires a whole new strategy and team to make that happen, how likely is that is the real question one needs to ask ???
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Couldn't have put it better myself.
Having done an analysis of the financials on this mess of a company I cannot help but wonder if there is something lurking beneath the covers which is even more terrifying than we first thought. For starters almost every AMP fund underperforms it's peers to a major extent. The underlying investment mandates seem OK but the actual funds are sub par performers. I actually wonder how they manage to do it.