Mattioli Woods buys City Trustees from Lighthouse for £1.85m

AIM-listed pension advisory firm Mattioli Woods has bought IFA national Lighthouse Group's pension administration provider City Trustees for £1.85 million.

City Trustees has £300 million under trusteeship and provides trustee and administration services to 965 Sipps, 123 SSASs and 14 funded unapproved retirement benefit schemes.

The company returned a loss £56,000 on revenues of £780,000 in 2009 but Mattioli Woods said it expected the firm to enhance earnings, arguing that it would benefit from cross-selling with Mattioli Woods' existing services and the combination of the two firm's assets.

Mattioli Woods will retain City Trustees' existing administration staff after the acquisition. It has also acquired City Trustees' associated company City Pensions as part of the deal.

Lighthouse Group bought City Trustees as part of its £2.7 million acquisition of Carrwood Barker Holdings in December 2005. It said it would retain the advisory business it acquired as part of the Carrwood deal. Lighthouse said the City Trustees sale would result in a £1.2 million profit on the book value of the company and a net cash inflow of £1.6 million which will be applied to its strategic cash reserves.

Mattioli Woods executive chairman Bob Woods (pictured) said the acquisition would allow the company to expand beyond its Leicester base.

'In addition to providing a London base for our Group and increasing the scale of our core Sipp and SSAS operations, the acquisition brings the opportunity to expand our range of services through the development of a separately branded administration proposition,' he said.

Lighthouse Group executive chairman David Hickey (pictured) added that the sale would allow for closer cooperation with Mattioli Woods.

'Despite trading steadily, these operations were sub-scale in our hands, and when approached by Mattioli Woods, we felt it appropriate to facilitate a transfer to a noted pensions specialist,' he said.