Lighthouse Group Plc (LON:LGT) CEO Malcolm Streatfield talks to DirectorsTalk about the launch of Luceo Asset Management. Malcolm provides more detail, explains what this means for the company, explains how the relationships formed with Zurich and Octopus and provides some insight into how the company has performed so far this year.
As one of the UK’s largest autonomous financial advice and wealth management groups, Lighthouse Group Plc provides a comprehensive range of services to businesses and individuals and is retained by most of the major trades unions and other affinity groups to advise their combined memberships of over 5 million members. The company has been listed on AIM since 2000 and presents an integrated financial services company for investors, coupled with significant scale in terms of distribution through financial advisers and wealth managers and its fully diversified business model.
The Group aims to increase its relationships with and the benefits it derives from its relationships with affinity groups and professional partners. In April 2014 Lighthouse announced the launch of its Lighthouse Pensions Trust (“LPT”), an unbundled multi-employer Master Trust product that provides a cost-effective and one-stop shop service to enable small- and medium- sized enterprises (“SMEs”), under the Group’s Lighthouse Workplace Solutions (“LWS”) branded service. Some 1.8 million SMEs are required to establish auto-enrolment compliant pension schemes for their employees between July 2015 and March 2018. LPT utilises target date funds managed by Alliance Bernstein, which manages $479 Billion of funds world-wide and is 63 per cent. owned by AXA, with Bridge Trustees Limited, a subsidiary of Eversheds LLP, acting as one of three corporate trustees and providing the Chair of the Trustee Board.
In June 2015 the Group announced an extension of its LWS offering with the launch of the Lighthouse Life Trust, again an unbundled multi-employer occupational Master Trust product that enables those businesses that have agreed to adopt LPT to meet their auto-enrolment obligations to provide death-in-service life assurance cover for all of their employees aged between 16 and 65, for the same cost per benefit, at very competitive rates, regardless of age, gender, location or pre-existing medical conditions. The scheme is underwritten by Zurich Assurance Limited with Bridge Trustees Limited as corporate trustee.
Lighthouse Group Plc operates from its headquarters in London as well as having principal operating offices in Stockport and Woodingdean, near Brighton.
