HBOS hopes rebranding will lure investors back to market

HBOS, the high street banking group, became the latest company to come up with a jazzy new corporate identity yesterday, unveiling plans to call its investment management business Insight.

The move may not be as exotic as recent rebrandings ­ PricewaterhoueCoopers Consulting is to become Monday while the mobile phone operator Hutchison has adopted 3 ­ but HBOS believes its new name will inspire investors to dabble in the stock market despite current negative returns.

The bank said it was so confident that the time is right to beef up its asset management arm that it will invest £40m over the next three years to attract fund managers and to market the new division.

HBOS ­ created out of a merger of Bank of Scotland and Halifax ­ has over the past three years obtained Clerical Medical and the fund management operation owned by Equitable Life. Insight will be the overall name for these two businesses as well as Halifax's own fund management arm. The Clerical Medical brand and Insight will be used to sell products through financial advisers to the public.

Douglas Ferrans, the chief executive of Insight Investment, said the move was intended to boost HBOS's presence in the retail investment market. Until now Clerical Medical has had some retail business but much of its assets under management have been big-ticket pension funds that it has handled for companies.

Mr Ferrans said the rationale behind Insight was to compete with banking rivals in asset management which, when markets are less gloomy, can be highly profitable.

He struck a bullish note about the timing of the initiative, saying: "It is ideal. We need to bring a lot of people in and the current environment when others are in contraction mode makes it easier for us."

By launching a more high profile investment management arm, HBOS hopes to boost the number of savings and investment products it sells through its banking branches.

Insight has targets of being one of the 10 largest sellers of investments by financial advisers. It also wants to increase its assets under management on the institutional side and aims to become one of the five largest providers of UK and European bonds and equities. HBOS believes its £40m investment is the largest one-off sum committed by a financial institution to building an asset management business organically. In recent years many businesses have bought fund management businesses wholesale, but the City believes some were overpriced.