Martin Gilbert, chairman of wealth manager AssetCo, said it continues to seek out acquisition opportunities and is targeting companies facing difficult trading conditions.

The company posted a surge in assets under management (at 30 September 2022) to £2.7 billion, from £113m in 2021.

Adding SVM Asset Management, which completed post year-end, takes AuM to £3.1bn.

The company posted a £9.2 million loss for the year (2021: profit of £14.6m) and declared an interim dividend of 1.3p per share.

Mr Gilbert, founder of Aberdeen Asset Management which merged in 2018 with Standard Life, said: “We continue to seek out potential opportunities for further inorganic expansion in relatively difficult trading conditions for asset management businesses generally.

“This creates opportunities for the agile AssetCo in its mission to acquire, improve and grow otherwise attractive businesses that are experiencing challenges or whose true value is unrecognised.” 

He added: “We are particularly pleased, as an example, with Parmenion and remain strong advocates of this very valuable business, the management team and believe that the client led initiatives as well as industry interest over the past year will deliver significant value for all its stakeholders.

“We are relentlessly focusing on serving our clients, sustaining investment performance, reducing costs, growing revenues and getting the group to profitability as soon as possible whilst being ready to pursue opportunity.”

Campbell Fleming, chief executive, said: “Our loss for the year was in part driven by a combination of acquisition costs and reorganisation costs as we right-size and integrate our acquired businesses.

“We are delivering on our acquisitive growth strategy whilst maintaining a focus on reducing costs across the business with a £10m annualised cost saving in River and Mercantile achieved.

“AssetCo has now successfully invested more than £40m in growing the business by completing the acquisitions of River and Mercantile and Revera, taking revenues from less than £0.5m last year to over £8m during the course of the year, with a forward-looking run rate of £17m when the acquisition of SVM is also factored in. 

“We are hugely grateful for the efforts of our investment, client and operations teams as well the continued support from our clients and our shareholders in what was a volatile, difficult and tough year for all.”