The biggest deal in Scotland this year has put an old name back on the front foot, writes TERRY MURDEN
Twenty years after it was demutualised and eight after it was ignominously booted out of its own parent company, Standard Life is once again a dominant force in Scotland’s financial services sector. It may not be quite the same company that can trace its roots deep into the nineteenth century, but that history was enough for Phoenix, which bought the business and brand in 2018, to realise the value in its name.
It is now back in the FTSE 100 ranking of top listed companies and the board has wasted no time flexing its muscles by acquiring Edinburgh rival Aegon UK which was put up for sale by its Dutch parent at the end of last year.
Aegon moved into Edinburgh in 1994 with the purchase of a 40% stake in Scottish Equitable and acquired the remaining shares by 1998. It initially occupied Scottish Equitable’s St Andrew Square offices, until moving to the Gyle on the western edge of the city.
It has been one of the lesser known of the Scottish financial services giants, though it has not lacked progress, and was not going to be short of suitors when the time came to sell.
The wider group delivered a strong first half in 2025, with rising workplace pension inflows and early signs of progress in its adviser platform strategy helping underpin the group’s wider return to profitability.
Its UK arm, which employs about 2,500 staff, reported workplace net flows of £2.1bn in the six months to 30 June, up 24% from £1.7bn in the same period last year.
The group’s expansion in the US, where it acquired the Transamerica company in 1999, latterly led shareholders to question the logic of a Dutch holding company overseeing a much larger American subsidiary. That debate accelerated after Lard Friese took over as chief executive in 2020.
Friese has spent the past five years selling off major Aegon operations, including its Dutch division, and oversaw the company’s departure from its long-time base in The Hague to Schiphol airport. In the US it will adopt the Transamerica brand.
While Aegon flees across the Atlantic, Standard Life will be busy re-establishing its Edinburgh credentials, now free of the confusion that followed the merger with Aberdeen Asset Management in 2017. Following the sale of the Standard Life assets to Phoenix a year later, the company was rebranded to the ill-fated Abrdn, and has now become the equally-confusing Aberdeen Group.
After several years nurturing its newly-acquired Standard Life assets as a business brand, Phoenix decided it rather liked the name more than its own. Ironically, its adopted brand is the one now doing the Phoenix-like resurrection on its return to its former home in Lothian Road.
Now is the time to focus on the newly-acquired asset. The Aegon deal will create a business with approximately £480bn in assets under administration and 16 million customers.
It will be ranked second in the market for the provision of workplace pension schemes in the UK. There will be opportunities for Standard Life to sell products to Aegon’s 2.1m workplace scheme customers.
Standard Life said the transaction would also transform it from a smaller retail provider to the UK’s second largest retail pensions and savings platform by assets.
Size matters in a sector where the big players can be quickly knocked off their perch. On its formation less than ten years ago Standard Life Aberdeen was an £11bn business that ranked among Europe’s biggest asset managers. Its rapid shrinkage to about than half that value saw it kicked out of the FTSE 100.
In the meantime, Phoenix flew in to Edinburgh, taking occupancy of the former home of Standard Life when it switched to purpose-built offices in St Andrew Square until realising it needed something smaller.
All this flitting about and changing names bears an uncanny resemblance to Wimbledon FC’s conversion to Milton Keynes Dons , when the west London club relocated to Buckinghamshire. The former Wombles were also resurrected, but arguments still rage over which is the real Wimbledon and which can claim to be the former FA Cup winners.
Likewise, old Standard Lifers who now work at the company’s historic offices in George Street under the Aberdeen Group name, must be asking if the new Standard Life is really just Phoenix in disguise.
That won’t matter too much to shareholders if the company proves a good investment, though a bit of stability in the branding merry-go-round wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Terry Murden was Scotland Editor and Business Editor at The Sunday Times, Business Editor at The Scotsman, and Business and City Editor at Scotland on Sunday. He is now Editor of Daily Business
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