SIP Nordic ditches Startpoint brand

SIP Nordic UK – the British arm of the Swedish structured products marketer – has rebranded its UK distribution arm from Startpoint Investments to SIP Nordic Investments.

The distributor, which has been active under the name Startpoint Investments since June 2013, intends to capitalise on its presence in the market and move to a more “independent model”, according to managing director David Northrop. “Startpoint used to be completely tied to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) a few years ago, an arrangement which, in practice if not in name, was carried over to BNP Paribas when they purchased RBS’s book,” said Northrop. “We used BNP for quite some time, and the StartPoint brand was the brand that we used to differentiate ourselves from the business that we’d previously done with RBS.”

The company is no longer tied to a single counterparty, and has marketed plans backed by securities from Commerzbank, Royal Bank of Canada and Morgan Stanley. “We’ve been training and educating for independent financial advisers (IFAs) for the last six years under the SIP Nordic UK brand, putting over 3,000 advisers through our training programme,” said Northrop. “We felt the time was right to capitalise on the SIP Nordic brand and emphasise the independence of the counterparties we’re now working with.”

Following the rebranding, SIP Nordic’s online platform and investment infrastructure will remain the same, so that any past Startpoint trades are still accessible on SIP Nordic’s website and still managed by provider/plan manager Meteor Asset Management.

The aim of the agreement with SIP Nordic Investments is to have consistency and competitiveness of products in the UK market, said Graham Devile, managing director at Meteor. “To achieve that has been hard,” said Devile. “The UK structured products market is difficult and you cannot be successful without consistency. SIP Nordic offered us the opportunity to tap into a distribution network that has IFAs at its core. This will allow Meteor to be in the UK retail structured products market consistently with a FTSE-only range for IFAs.”

The rebranding is not a joint venture with Meteor, said Northrop. “We have a really good working relationship and the two businesses have so far complemented each other when it comes to distribution, but SIP Nordic Investments is part of SIP Nordic UK and completely independent from Meteor,” he said. “Where the relationship with Meteor comes in is as plan manager, which has been the case under StartPoint and will continue to be so under SIP Nordic Investments,” said Northrop.

To mark the re-branding and to celebrate its close working relationship with Meteor, SIP Nordic Investments is marketing the FTSE Kick Out Plan April 2015, the third Morgan Stanley note to be jointly marketed by Meteor and SIP Nordic, a practice not seen in the market for nearly five years, when several building societies used this approach. “We’ve decided to work together on trades which are relatively vanilla,” said Northrop. “Rather than competing with each other for the vanilla market, we’ll work together, buying one product with one ISIN number and branding one under Meteor and one under SIP Nordic. Effectively, both parties will sell the same trade but to a much wider audience without having to compete with one another.”

The new SIP Nordic Investments FTSE Kick Out Plan April 2015 is a six-year autocall product offering a 60% soft protection barrier and a potential 9% return for every year the plan is in force. The product is open for subscription and will be available on SRP’s database shortly.

Devile also said that Meteor reached an agreement to provide back-office administration services for Verbatim Asset Management's range of structured deposits.