I imagine that somewhere there are printers and marketing departments rubbing there hands with glee at the constant name changing that goes on within the financial services industry. I have no idea why, but Aegon Asset Management was rebranded as Kames Capital yesterday.
The press release was sent out yesterday and much of the news only came through once we had all packed up and gone home. Why they were not able to communicate this sort of change in advance I have no idea - but it doesn't sit well with me and one can only be left thinking "why the rush?". Most of us were only really getting used to the Aegon name having had the Scottish Equitable Asset Management name dropped in 2001.
This means extra work for everyone, writing to investors with holdings in Aegon funds and updating a myriad of data files and entries. This now seems to be a part of the normaly way things are in financial services - and there seems to be something like this on at least a monthly basis. To my mind this seems incredibly wasteful and not doing the financial services industry or investors any favours. If anything this always smacks of a smoke screen.
Some of our ethical investors use the Aegon Ethical Equity fund which will now be called the Kames Ethical Equity Fund... see what they did there... genius!
Click here for the Kames Capital press release - be warned it contains the usual corporate news release terminology. Sorry for my rather expasperated tone, but this is no KC and the sunshine band.
No comments:
Post a Comment