Jobs at risk as Skandia looks to shut nine offices
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Skandia is proposing closing nine regional adviser support offices and 100 sales staff are likely to face redundancy as a result of a review of the support the firm provides advisers.
Skandia is creating an adviser direct centre, based at the firm’s head office in Southampton. It says the centre will work in parallel with Skandia’s regional business consultants, providing remote support to advisers via telephone, email and online services.
The firm is proposing that its regional business consultants be based at home allowing it to close Skandia’s nine regional offices.
It is creating a sales support centre which will provide all pre-sale support to advisers such as new business quotes, application queries, product literature requests and explanations of product features or terms.
This service is currently provided by different teams in Skandia’s regional offices. As a result 100 positions could be made redundant.
The changes will be phased in over 12 months.
Chief development officer Peter Mann says: “We recognise we must evolve in line with the needs of financial advisers and believe different types of financial adviser business will want to interact with Skandia in different ways.
“The changes we have announced today are designed to ensure we continue to provide first class support to advisers, that matches their needs and gives them choice in how they interact with us.”
Money Marketing reported last week that sales director Dave Chessel had been made redundant after 15 years with the firm.
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Readers' comments (39)
Rob Reeves | 2 Nov 2009 6:10 pm
About time.too!
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Julian Stevens | 2 Nov 2009 6:20 pm
Skandia always said they would maintain their branch network, as this was a facility much valued by their supporting IFA's, though having pared down their charges so much, I suppose we should hardly be surprised at this development.
At least they'll be retaining their broker consultants, so we should be able to continue to receive face to face service and troubleshooting assistance at local level.
Should Standard Life follow suit, that will be the end of life office branch networks. Maybe they already have ~ we'vet placed no business with them since April 2001 and we never receive any communications from them, so we wouldn't know. End of an era.
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Anonymous | 2 Nov 2009 6:33 pm
Rob - people are losing their jobs and you come out with a comment like that. Respect, dignity an class. You've either got it or you haven't....
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Anonymous | 2 Nov 2009 7:45 pm
That's a very constructive comment Robb... Not.
Would you have the guts to say that to the 100 staff that have worked very hard for skandia just to be thrown on the scrapheap.
3 or 4 branches will close before christmas.
Lets see how IFA's like dealing directly with Southampton.. All the advisors that I speak with dread the idea of having to deal with Southampton.... Mark my words, this new proposal will have serious consequences for Skandia.
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Anonymous | 2 Nov 2009 9:00 pm
as someone who is not directly linked to anything financial .i think that how lucky for the other1500 employees skandia have kept in their jobs.unlike rbs, lloydstsb, need anyone say more
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Anonymous | 2 Nov 2009 9:01 pm
please, no gloating or smart comments. This has been a traumatic time for the Skandia staff who have always done their utmost to support the company and their "customers" There is an immense sense of shock and sadness so please if you want to say thanks to the staff who have supported you over the years, speak now. If your inclination is to be unkind , please resist, real lives are affected
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Anonymous | 2 Nov 2009 9:10 pm
I am a FA in Scotland and I see this as a very bad move. I rely heavily on the support I get from Skandia Glasgow.
One of the main reasons i choose to do business with Skandia is because of the fantastic support i receive from Glasgow.
Without the regioal support what is there to separate Skandia from other providers.
I will now have a tough decision as to where best o place my clients money, as Skandia's service will no doubt become like all the others....rubbish.....Oh that will be 10 workings days...
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derek richings | 2 Nov 2009 9:44 pm
this is what Axa Sun Life did a year ago and funnily enough that is when they went from being my main supplier to the bottom! At least Skandalous Life will be able to compete down at the bottom.
Good bye skandia the last 25 years were fun.
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Anonymous | 2 Nov 2009 9:53 pm
It's just a sign of the times pal.....I sympathise with those losing their jobs....Honestly speaking, regional offices for life companies don't make sense any more. Broker consultants could work from their spare bedrooms getting all the support they need from HQ....
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Anthony Farrell | 3 Nov 2009 0:35 am
Firstly, I would like to record my best wishes for the future, to all the wonderful staff at Skandia Manchester who I dealt with for over a decade as director of a regional IFA. Over many years, they were always helpful, often funny, sometimes mistaken, but always THERE - to answer whatever query sprang to mind and provide however many permutations of the same quotation the compliance people needed to feed their ever more voracious appetites. They are all fine people and though I could thank many in person for the sake of modesty (theirs not mine) I shall refrain.
Secondly, albeit that I have not seen Old Mutual’s books for the current accounting year - and one has to allow for the possibility that this announcement may be born of force of circumstance rather than by will of design – this is a business mistake of terminal proportion.
Skandia, having been the innovative leader of the eighties and nineties soon became the laggard as the open architecture platforms expanded their respective propositions and the old hacks in Edinburgh and East Anglia caught on to offering an actual choice of funds to invest in other than their tired own.
Nonetheless, Skandia maintained its sales and it presence thanks largely, in fact almost certainly only, to its branch network with named and friendly voices, its face-to-face consultants, its roadshows, days out, Cowes week and Christmas dinners and all the other things that gave it a human face in an age of mailshot bombardment, random emails and call centres where you could press 1, 2 or 3 to get cut off or if it was your lucky day you could actually speak to an idiot.
No doubt all of this is being done in the name of rationalisation, more properly – cheapness, but has no one yet noticed that cheapness is not all. As I sit here in front of my 8GB twin screen PC, listening to a blu-ray on my 7.1 sound system and drain the last dregs of my estate bottled Grüner Veltliner I thank the gods I’m not on a ZX Spectrum, drinking Blue Nun from a plastic mug with a twenty-five year old transistor radio crackling in the background, and it seems that “better” is worth paying more for than “worse”, even though worse would be considerably cheaper. Skandia used to understand this, but now it appears to have forgotten.
As a reader remarks above, it’s the “End of an era” - a sad end brought about by this awful government and it’s even more awful, hapless Quango, the FSA – but I have to say dear Skandia board, maybe the era’s not dead, it could be just in a coma and if you weren’t so quick to pull the plug, who knows, one day it might just wake up.
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