One of the things that struck me about the AXA results this week is how big the BNZ deal is.
As the company keeps pointing out it makes them "the clear leader in retail wealth management" space - a claim others may dispute.
With the deal funds under management increases from $2.5 billion to $8.4 billion. Not bad in anyone's book. What's big about it is AXA gets 40,000 new clients and access to tens of thousands more.
And it's exclusive. We understand the deal to distribute products through the BNZ is exclusive and for quite a long period of time - possibly as many as 10 years.
As we pointed out in the story AXA will move BNZ's funds to its Assure platform and "migrate existing Bank of New Zealand Investment Management customers to AXA products and services over the next 18 months.
We also understand that the deal puts AXA back into the home loan space. Good Returns will be providing more detail on this as info comes to hand.
It's going to be interesting to watch how AXA does digesting this deal and how it runs things.
The last deal like this was ANZ and ING getting together a number of years ago now. One of the observations is that while a deal like this gives size and distribution, managing it effectively is a major task.
The two other things of interest in the results were the strength of AXA's risk business and what is happening at Spicers. More on these later.
One of the things that struck me about the AXA results this week is how big the BNZ deal is.