Business as usual for Multiport

Growth opportunity

By Darin Tyson-Chan
Mon 29 Mar 2010

There will be no business or brand changes to the SMSF administrator following its sale to Axa Australia.

SMSF administration specialist Multiport will continue to trade under its own brand name and will continue to operate in the same fashion, despite the business having been wholly acquired by Axa Australia midway through last year.

"We will be leaving it to run as a separate entity. The actual administration service, the web-based service, and the underlying technology will all be exactly as it was," Axa Australia general manager sales and marketing Adrian Emery said.

"Multiport will continue to service their clients, their licensees, their dealer groups in the way that they did," he said.

However, Axa is looking to increase the volume of users of the Multiport administration service.

"Some of that will be via traditional financial planners, and some of it will be looking to pick up books of business that are becoming too large for smaller practitioners to administer," Emery said.

Axa is also looking at the acquisition as a potential growth opportunity stemming from the industry reviews.

Emery said Axa expects compliance obligations to possibly become more arduous and certainly not less onerous when all of the reviews are complete, a situation that will potentially drive more SMSF practitioners to draw upon the services of specialist administrators such as Multiport.

Even though Axa has full ownership of Multiport, SMSF advisers operating under the Axa dealer group licence will not be forced to use the administration service.

Thirty per cent of Multiport's funds under management (FUM) are currently represented by Axa practitioners, but Emery said the firm won't necessarily be looking to increase this ratio.

"I'd like to think it's 30 per cent of a growing base all the time," he said.

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