(Reuters) -Britain’s Lloyds Banking Group will take control of Schroders’ 49.9% stake in their joint venture after the business struggled with growth targets and high executive turnover, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
Under the plans, Lloyds and Schroders are set to abandon the wealth management venture, Schroders Personal Wealth (SPW), which targeted the “mass affluent” section of the market, the report said citing people familiar with the matter.
Lloyds and Schroders both declined to comment on the report, while SPW did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Taking full control would give Lloyds greater oversight and flexibility to sell a broader range of products to its more than 3 million mass affluent customers, a person familiar with the matter told the FT.
The partnership, launched in 2019 by Lloyds’ ex-CEO António Horta-Osório and Schroders’ former chief Peter Harrison, started with 13 billion pounds of assets transferred from Lloyds and had grown to 15.7 billion pounds under management by December 2024.
In July, Lloyds Banking Group reported a 5% rise in first-half profit, driven by higher income from mortgages and unsecured consumer lending despite broader UK economic challenges.
(Reporting by Raechel Thankam Job in Bengaluru; Editing by Janane Venkatraman)
