The new UPP comes with a more competitive charging structure designed to target the lump sum market, and will have full access to the 4,500 approved assets on its platform.
“Essentially we’ve moved our pricing base to go after the lump sum market,” said Graham Morrall, global sales and marketing director at Hansard International which is based in the Isle of Man.
The main change to the charging structure is over the first five or eight years of the bond. “It will put us in the top quartile in terms of competitiveness from a price perspective,” Morrall said.
Hansard Global offers a range of flexible and tax-efficient investment products with a life assurance policy wrapper designed to appeal to affluent international investors. It sells these policies through a network of independent financial advisers and the retail operations of some financial institutions principally in the Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
Over the past 12 months the company, which had assets under administration of £923.7m at the end of December 2014, has been upgrading and restructuring its product offerings and distribution systems following a difficult few years.
In its latest results the company reported sales had fallen by 47% in the last six months of 2014, the first half of its 2015 financial year, to £29.4m due largely to the termination of a lucrative distribution agreement in Japan.
“The new UPP brings to a conclusion the major part of the grunt work of the last 12 months,” Morrall said. “On the product side we’ve effectively re-launched the entire range and brought it all up to date, though that’s not the end of our work,” he added.
Further announcements on new distribution agreements with IFA networks are expected shortly.
