Standard Life finally demutualised in July, listing its shares on the London Stock Exchange and opening its doors to shareholder capital.
This was the culmination of much hard work by the management team, which followed many years of debate about the rights and wrongs of transferring ownership away from its members. The question shifted inexorably from ‘if’ to ‘when’ through the years as it became clear that the risks, rewards, costs and management requirements of a multi-faceted international savings and investment business did not sit well with shared passive ownership by a pool of historical UK-based with-profits policyholders.
All debates about ‘ifs’ and ‘whens’ are of course now irrelevant. What is relevant is the question of what, if anything, existing policyholders should now be doing with their Standard Life policies? In particular, will the with-profits policyholders continue to get their fair share of profits?
