SIP Nordic to relaunch as Meteor Consulting

SIP Nordic Investments, the UK arm of Swedish structured product marketers SIP Nordic Fondkomission, has officially closed for business only four months after re-branding from StartPoint Investments to its current moniker.

David Northrop, managing director at SIP Nordic, said that the UK business was closing as it was “no longer aligned” with its Swedish and Finnish counterparts, blaming the latter’s restrictive business model that ties the firm to using only BNP Paribas and UBS as counterparties to their products.

“We have therefore created a new business, Meteor Consulting Ltd, which is an appointed representative of Meteor Asset Management,” said Northrop. “The new business will support Meteor in the distribution of their products, as Meteor are fully independent, which suits us and our independent financial advisers (IFAs),” he said.

Effectively Meteor Consulting will leverage the SIP Nordic sales force to distribute Meteor Asset Management’s products, said Meteor’s managing director, Graham Devile (pictured).

“We remain as an independent provider but with a stronger sales team,” said Devile. “We now have a more widespread regional coverage of the UK market and we are in a better position to focus on the areas our sales teams are looking after.”

After the re-branding in February this year, SIP Nordic Investments only marketed six structured products including structured notes from Commerzbank and Morgan Stanley, three of which were co-branded with Meteor; as well as deposits by Lloyds Bank and RBC. Under its old name, StartPoint Investments, the firm distributed 65 products hedged by BNP Paribas since June 2013.

SIP Nordic, which in its reincarnated form managed only to create three original products (all backed by Commerzbank) before breaking away from its Nordic equivalent, evidently failed to see any benefits in being exclusively tied down.

Speaking to SRP today, Northrop admitted that the creation of Meteor Consulting as a distributing partner to Meteor Asset Management was “the next logical step as the UK business was far closer aligned to Meteor than to SIP Nordic”.

Back in February, the re-branding was explained as a move to a more independent model. “We’ve been training and educating for IFAs for the last six years under the SIP Nordic UK brand, putting over 3,000 advisers through our training programme,” said Northrop earlier this year. “We felt the time was right to capitalise on the SIP Nordic brand and emphasise the independence of the counterparties we’re now working with, ditching the StartPoint brand which used to be completely tied to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) a few years ago, an arrangement which, in practice if not in name, was carried over to BNP Paribas when they purchased RBS’s book.”

Meteor Asset Management is the second most active distributor of structured products in the UK retail market. Year to date, the firm has marketed almost 400 structured products in the UK since 2007 of which 302 are still live products.

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SIP Nordic to relaunch as Meteor Consulting