Scottish Friendly Assurance (SFA)
Deal Summary
Catalyst 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 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'.
What difference did we make?
Key to this transaction was the ability of Catalyst to access international buyers, through its international partnership, Mergers Alliance. This enabled us to:
- Provide detailed research and local knowledge of each potential buyer
- Understand the internal decision making process within each buyer
- 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.
