As one of Britain’s leading asset managers, Aberdeen has had a torrid decade. 

The £11billion merger and joint leadership cooked up by adventurous boss Martin Gilbert and Standard Life’s technocratic leader Keith Skeoch was doomed from the outset.

Both left and eventually assurer Standard Life was bundled off to legacy pensions and life group Phoenix, while Aberdeen experimented with all kinds of devices, such as a trendy, short-lived name-change under Stephen Bird to ‘abrdn’, which no one could pronounce. Some suggested ‘a burden’.

Spirited new boss Jason Windsor, jettisoned the moniker and restored aberdeen – with a lower-case ‘a’ – to the letterhead, without using brand consultants.

Windsor – formerly of Aviva – has set about making Aberdeen relevant again. 

He’s been engaged with the inherited acquisition of trading platform Interactive Investor (II) and a stake in fashionable logistics and warehousing outfit Tritax Management, which manages the listed firm Tritax Big Box. 

He also rescued the high-performing Herald Investment Trust, run by intuitive tech stock-picker Katie Potts, from US raider Boaz Weinstein of Saba.

The deals suggest Aberdeen is recapturing some of the verve which made it a fund management and stock market force.

The group, like other UK asset managers, needed to freshen up in an age when passive funds – run by US-owned giants such as Fidelity and offering low management fees – have endangered the active investment market. And Aberdeen is trying to stem redemptions (outflows) from its funds.

It is by attracting a different generation of investors that it has been building back revenue and margins, becoming profitable again after many loss-making years.

Tritax may be only a small part of Aberdeen’s £556billion under management but the investment, at a time when logistics and data centres have become the go-to place for real estate, has proved shrewd.

Until recently the value in firms such as Tritax building space for data centres was unrecognised. But the change is illustrated by Californian predator Prologis’s £14.3billion takeover of British warehouse landlord Segro – the UK’s most valuable listed property company.

‘Tritax is one example of how we have been improving the profitability of the group,’ says Windsor. 

‘The long-term potential of the logistics and digital infrastructure sector is clear and through our extended ownership we’re well positioned to capitalise on the transformative impact of AI on real estate.’

Aberdeen took an initial 60 per cent stake in Tritax Management in 2021, and raised it to 80 per cent in April. It aims to take full control by 2029. 

This gives it a foothold in logistics, with assets under management climbing to nearly £10billion and generating strong revenues.

The £4.3billion value of Tritax Big Box Reit almost equals Aberdeen’s at £4.55 billion, which highlights Tritax’s growth potential.

When Aberdeen bought II for £1.4billion in 2022 it was regarded as a diversion into the retail market for a group catering to institutional and professional investors.

That view – shared by this writer at the time – proved wrong. Windsor tells me growth has been ‘very strong’ with the number of II clients climbing to 525,000 this June.

That is 10 per cent up on the year before, with II reporting a 30 per cent rise in clients with self-investment personal pensions, net inflows of £7.3billion and assets under management of £97.3 billion. 

Windsor says ‘II has impressive growth and plenty more room to continue on that path in the UK’s vibrant wealth market’.

Many clients are transfers from platforms such as private equity-owned Hargreaves Lansdown, which proves more costly for many investors. Pots worth more than £15,000 are the main beneficiaries of the savings, II claims.

As impressive as the add-ons at Aberdeen are, the real turnaround will only come when active investment becomes fashionable again.

Aberdeen has huge expertise in emerging markets and over time seeks to reverse outflows, which hit £4.9billion last year. 

This was countered by inflows of £3.6billion, a net departure of £1.3billion, – up on £900million in the previous year. 

But a 60 per cent rise in the share price in the past two years suggests shareholders believe it is doing something right.