Standard Life Aberdeen PLC has actually gone through with it.
It was an announcement that unleashed a raft of mockery on Twitter, but the UK asset manager is now officially known as abrdn plc, all lower case and pronounced “Aberdeen.” The company’s ticker is also changing to ABDN from SLA.
The new name symbolizes “clarity of focus, renewed sense of purpose and drive for sustainable growth,” the company said in a statement yesterday.
The asset manager plans to rebrand its various units under the new name in the coming months.
The company reported almost ￡535 billion (US$741.3 billion) of assets under management and administration at the end of December last year, down from about ￡655 billion as of the end of December 2017, company filings showed.
Since being hired for the top job in September last year, chief executive officer Stephen Bird has rejigged his senior team and outlined plans to build a stable of passive products.
He has said that could eventually account for as much as 30 percent of assets at the active-biased manager.
The combination of Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life in 2017 was intended to boost scale, allowing the firm to compete where low-fee passive rivals have seized an increasing portion of the market share. Some of the expected payoffs from the merger proved illusive as the firm struggled to handle the dynamic of two cochief executive officers, multiple brands and hundreds of funds.
Bird wants to expand in Asia and to leverage a gap in the UK advice market, the company said in a statement in January.
The asset manager “is at a turning point, almost four years after its fruitless merger,” Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Sarah Jane Mahmud wrote last month.
Bird’s strategic plans might brighten the outlook, she said.
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