Perpetual Q4 curate’s egg favours KKR

With shareholders yet to vote on the KKR’s move to acquire Perpetual Limited’s Wealth Management and Corporate Trust businesses, the company has reported assets under management (AUM) down by around 5% to $215 billion.

At the same time, Perpetual said the company’s distribution team has been focusing on client retention and client growth.

In its fourth quarter update released to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Perpetual chief executive and managing director, Rob Adams, saying the June quarter showed a mixed performance across Perpetual’s businesses with Corporate Trust and Wealth management delivering steady performance, while Asset Management “experienced a difficult quarter impacted by net outflows, markets and currency movements”.

“Our Asset Management business was impacted by the timing of several institutional client redemptions and short-term delays in expected new institutional inflows in specific strategies as well as softer equity markets in Australian and global indices,” he said.

In doing so, Adams said that J O Hambro, TSW and Trillium boutiques had seen net outflows in global and international strategies over the period while, in Australia, “Pendal had a challenging quarter with outflows in cash (cyclical, low margin) and Australian equities, driven by manager rationalisation following a super fund merger and outflows from lower margin former Westpac AUM”.

However, he claimed that, overall, investment performance had been robust with 66% of the firm’s strategies outperforming over a three-year basis to 30 June 2024.

The company said that Funds Under Administration within the Corporate Trust business had reached over $1.2 trillion at 30 June, while Wealth Management total funds under administration was down 1% at $19.8 billion.