Robin Beer, chief executive of Brewin Dolphin

The firm’s total funds increased by 12.8% to £46.7bn in the quarter (Q2 2020: £41.4bn), with discretionary funds up 13.7% to £40.6bn (Q2 2020: £35.7bn) driven by improved investment performance and robust inflows.

Total funds include £2.7bn of acquired funds following the acquisition of Investec Capital & Investments (Ireland) Limited (ICIIL) in Q1 2020.

In the third quarter of this year, Brewin Dolphin’s discretionary net flows of £0.4bn, +4.5% (Q2 2020: £0.4bn, +3.8%, Q1 2020: £0.1bn, +1.0%).

The firm’s MSCI PIMFA Private Investor Balanced Index was up 10.6% and the FTSE 100 Index up by 8.8%, during the quarter ended 30 June 2020.

The results revealed that Brewin Dolphin’s total income was £92.7m (Q3 2019: £87.3m), signalling an increase of 6.2% year on year, driven in part by higher commissions due to elevated trading activity and income from recent acquisitions of £5.2m.

Year to date total income was £268.5m, an increase of 7.6% year on year.

The firm’s total discretionary income increased by 3.8% to £79.1m (Q3 2019: £76.2m) due to higher commissions. Year to date total discretionary income grew by 5.4% to £228.6m.

Commenting on the results, Robin Beer, chief executive, said: “We continue to deliver resilient results despite the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic have imposed on our business in supporting our clients and colleagues. Overall funds increased by 12.8% in the quarter as markets recovered. We had another strong quarter of net inflows across both our direct and intermediaries’ channels, with an annualised growth rate in total discretionary net flows of 4.5%, demonstrating continued demand for our services and the effectiveness of our people and operations.

“We are delivering on multiple infrastructure projects despite the challenges of remote working. Next week we switch over to our new client management system following comprehensive testing and remote training of our employees. In response to COVID-19 we have continued to review our office operations and have re-opened a number of small offices on a controlled basis, prioritising our employee’s and clients’ health and safety and ensuring consistency with government’s guidelines.”

He added: “We anticipate that our larger offices will take longer to reopen fully. We have also reassessed the impact and potential risk on the next phase of our custody and settlement implementation programme, which requires rigorous testing of the new system interfaces with existing technology and remote training for employees.

“To mitigate any execution and training risk we have pushed back the implementation of the system to the first half of the 2021 calendar year.”