Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life was always an unlikely combination. For a start, look at the respective chief executives, who contentiously decided to share the top job at their newly merged group.
Martin Gilbert is the pugnacious and entrepreneurial fund manager who built Aberdeen from a £100 million start-up into Britain’s biggest independent investments group with assets under management of more than £300 billion. His counterpart at Standard Life is Keith Skeoch, the equally determined but quieter intellectual who began his career as a civil service economist. After a stint in charge of Standard Life’s funds business, Mr Skeoch took charge of the more conservatively minded £350 billion Edinburgh-based group in 2015.
More than 21 months after the merger was confirmed in March last