Catalyst wraps up another major financial services deal

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Business Services sector head Humphries

Catalyst has acted as lead advisor on the sale of Scottish Friendly Insurance Services to Citibank Global Transaction Services.

Scottish Friendly Insurance Services (SFIS) is the wrap administration business of Scottish Friendly Assurance (SFA), Scotland’s largest mutual society. A wrap platform enables individuals and financial advisors to view and manage client investment portfolios by providing highly automated virtual environments, accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This assists financial advisors and managers to provide core services to their clients in a cost efficient way.

SFA established its wrap administration business in 2006 and, from its offices in Glasgow, it now serves major companies including Aviva and Nucleus Financial Group. Changes in legislation, following the Retail Distribution Review, will result in a major increase in the use of wrap platforms making this an attractive deal for Citibank.

"Citibank is a strong strategic buyer for SFA’s wrap administration business", commented Catalyst partner and head of the financial services sector team, Mark Humphries. "To establish their own wrap platform would have been extremely costly and a big operational, technical and legal risk. Citibank was keen to acquire a leading wrap administration platform that had been successfully proven over the last five years. With Citibank’s support and backing the business will go from strength to strength".

Citibank is a leading financial services company operating in 160 countries with approximately 200 million customers. Citibank’s Global Transaction Services division offers services to multinational corporations, financial institutions and public sector organisations around the world. Following completion of the deal SFIS will be integrated into Citibank’s award-winning wealth management platform – 'Open Wealth'.

Kevin Bonar, Managing Director, Citibank Investor and Wealth Services EMEA, said, "We are very impressed with SFA’s wrap platform and the pool of people talent. It complements our existing investor suite of services perfectly. By combining Citi’s industry-leading products and global reach with SFIS’s expertise in wrap administration we can further extend our capabilities to meet the growing needs of our clients."

Key to this transaction was the ability of Catalyst to access international buyers, through its international partnership, Mergers Alliance, as Humphries explains, "Through detailed research and local knowledge of each potential buyer, we were able to understand the internal decision making process within each buyer, which was unique to them, and identify who the key decision makers were. With this knowledge, we designed a sale process which engaged these strategic buyers and then presented SFIS in such a way that the benefits of an acquisition were easily understood by each buyer. As a result we had multiple global strategic buyers competing for the business."