St. James's Place Share Discussion Threads

[jakleeds] 20/3/2024 07:36

Any director buying these would be very foolish. I remember when the HBOS share price collapsed from about £12 to £2.50 and Andy Hornby (then HBOS CEO) bought a load of shares.
Although there was a temporary small bounce, it didn’t stop the HBOS price tanking and they nearly went under, until eventually being taken over by Lloyds.
Let’s not forget, these were spun out of HBOS and many of the staff here used to be there.
There may be a temporary bounce but there’s way, way too much bad news still to come out of the closet for there to be anything other than a HBOS style ending.
The next news will be worse than the previous news.
Some of the advisers, who’ve had it so good for so long, will begin contemplating suicide.

[dexdringle] 19/3/2024 22:25

Would be nice to see some very large director buys. And / or some RNS's of institutional / activist investor accumulations.

Once it turns it will move quickly.

[dexdringle] 19/3/2024 22:05

Exactly. As an adviser, each client not seen is a missed sale opportunity. Advisers pay fortunes for 'hot leads' so they would be stupid to ignore clients already on the books !

[tim 3] 19/3/2024 22:03

Agree especially when you consider these meetings are great opportunities to generate more income from you.

[dexdringle] 19/3/2024 22:00

Slim, but not inconceivable.

It is though highly unlikely that more than one in ten SJP clients has had no contact whatsoever from or with their adviser for six years.

When they came up with the £420 million figure SJP already had good adviser / client contact data. Also, the new CEO would want to kitchen sink it and not come back later saying "sorry, I underestimated".

SJP need to leverage and start doing share buybacks at this level. They won't be this cheap for long....

[fenners66] 19/3/2024 18:51

Ok so there were £168bn FUM and 958k clients.

So average client size is £175k

Take 0.5% x 175k x6 = 5.25k per client potential

If all claimed it would be just over £5bn

So they are estimating the problem as about 8.5%

So if I knew someone who was
a, a client
b, in that 8.5% the odds would be pretty slim huh ?

[fenners66] 19/3/2024 18:43

So I decided to look up the full results to see what FUM and clients they have.

The irony of the front cover " Providing Trusted Financial Advice " then including a provision of £420+ m for
failing to do so.

Have they been reading the Putin playbook - say the opposite of what has been happening...?

[jgoldby] 19/3/2024 14:45

You are relying on the assumption that it’s the low value clients that are neglected and that it is limited to a small proportion. My experience was that it could be any client and I made the whistleblower complaint regarding 80% of the clients involved receiving no advice in the period of two years prior to purchase.

Obviously I can’t give details, but there are examples of several thousand pounds a year of income being paid for individual clients who had not been seen since the inception of their plans.

Any attempt to mitigate the issues are SJP are entirely fanciful.

[dexdringle] 19/3/2024 14:23

They have almost 1 million customers. If the smallest 25% of those customers, who account for maybe 10% of the assets under management, have been neglected that's £15 billion of assets under management due a refund. Those 25% of clients are 250,000 clients so around £60,000 each. So £1,800 over the whole six years each AVERAGE refunds - some of which will then be clawed back from the Advisers.

£15 billion x 0.5% x 6 years = £450 million total.

SJP should have maintained their exclusivity and had a minimum client investment size of £250,000. Instead they have chased volume at the expense of quality and revenue per client.

They need £25bn less under management, 300,000 fewer clients and 1,500 fewer advisers. Thereby massively reducing Head Office and support / admin / compliance staff costs. Two thirds of the business produces 90% of the revenue. Ditch the other third. Improve the service massively for the remaining clients and advisers.

[jakleeds] 19/3/2024 13:25

Exactly fenners !! Well said.

[fenners66] 19/3/2024 11:31

>dexdringle
19 Mar '24 - 11:24 - 905 of 905
"No SJP adviser would neglect a £300,000 from whom he was receiving £1,400 per annum."

Dex a lot of what you write has a lot of sense in it.

But that comment is ridiculous.
SJP have already admitted that thousands of customers have had their charges reduced and provided £426m for redress because this has been happening.

To be in denial that a customer worth 1400 per annum would be serviced after this evidence is crazy.
How would they get to £426m for 6 years overcharging from a customer base being charged less?

Also even if you know some advisors - you do not know what the other hundreds or thousands of advisors do or don't do !

[dexdringle] 19/3/2024 11:24

No SJP adviser would neglect a £300,000 from whom he was receiving £1,400 per annum. He might neglect a £70,000 client from whom he receives only £350 per annum....

[jakleeds] 19/3/2024 11:23

That’s only the ongoing advice fee. On top of that there are additional charges like , product fees , transaction costs.
On average I think the annual fees come to about 2.2% with SJP

[jakleeds] 19/3/2024 09:28

£10,000 over 7 years is an annual advice fee of £1400, so a £300k investment.

It’s the ongoing advice fee . 100%

[dexdringle] 19/3/2024 09:15

No chance. If it was the advice element only the total fees would have been £40,000 and you don't think The Telegraph would have jumped on that number like a tramp on chips ?

The article talks about 'fees' and doesn't say 'this is for advice only in addition to all other fees he paid...'

£350 a year doesn't make for such a dramatic headline as £10,000.

[jakleeds] 19/3/2024 09:10

No. He’s talking about the ongoing advice fee only in my opinion.

[dexdringle] 19/3/2024 09:03

That's £1,400 a year of which a quarter £350 went to the adviser. The rest was product and investment charges which would happen anyway. He must have only around £70,000 invested.

So he's paid around £2,500* in total over 7 years for 'advice' that he says he hasn't received. The £10,000 figure is disingenuous as that is the total cost of product, investment and advice.

* SJP just need to give this back to him and claim it back from the Adviser. It isn't rocket science.

[jgoldby] 18/3/2024 16:14

You start to get the feeling that some participants in this discussion have a corporate drum to bang

[tootsie] 18/3/2024 14:42

I wouldn't ever opt for fees. Pay by the hour.