One More Thing:Irish Life & Management (ILIM) continues to go from strength to strength.
A trading update published yesterday by its parent group, Irish Life & Permanent, stated that institutional inflows into ILIM for the first six months of 2007 would be more than €2 billion.
This compares with €1.9 billion of inflows for 2006 as a whole and brings ILIM's level of funds under management to about €34 billion.
This means that the business has doubled in size since 2003.
In 1998, its assets under management stood at just €12 billion.
The transformation has been the result of a change in investment style. Its consensus fund has done well, the recent influx of EBS Summit Funds has boosted its balance and a mandate has been secured from the European Central Bank.
ILIM is now a highly-valuable franchise. Fund managers are usually priced at 2-5 per cent of their assets under management.
This would give ILIM a value of between €680 million and €1.7 billion.
The upturn in ILIM's fortunes contrasts with that of Bank of Ireland Asset Management (BIAM).
Once the jewel in the crown for Bank of Ireland, the fund manager has seen €15 billion in client funds moved to other managers since 2004.
At the end of March, BIAM's assets under management had declined to €43.7 billion. This is the result of a number of years of poor investment returns on behalf of clients and also the loss of some senior people.
ILIM will no doubt be determined to avoid a similar fall from grace.
