Mr. Barker: Yes, I will start from the middle and then work outwards. I head up Old Mutual US Life, which is the United States life insurance arm of Old Mutual Group. Old Mutual itself has five synergistic businesses: Life Insurance in the US; Asset Management in the US headed up by Scott Powers, chief executive of Old Mutual Asset Management (OMAM); its originating businesses which are in South Africa – Old Mutual South Africa, which is a very large (ex)mutual with 30% market share; and Nedcor, which is one of the largest banks in South Africa. There is also a UK financial services business and a UK headquarters. It is essentially a South Africa origin company based in the UK, which believes that the US offers a tremendous potential for new entrants. We became a new entrant in 2000. I was holding a watching job then, looking for something suitable to be the core of Old Mutual US Life and found that in 2001 and have since been developing the business that we took over.
TWST: What are the characteristics of the US market that are attractive for new entrants?
Mr. Barker: I’ve worked in the US before and so has Jim Sutcliffe, who is the group chief executive of Old Mutual, for other companies and we have formed a view that it's a very large market; there are immense amounts of what you might call “niches”. Some of them are very underdeveloped and some offer particular opportunities to overseas companies. So, we were coming in certainly as a fresh company and, particularly when others had already gone stale in the market chasing these equity type markets, we could find quite easily some real opportunity; the size of the market, the size of the population being the drivers. And we have done just that. We have focused quite narrowly on a niche that worked very well for us in 2002 and have expanded it into a market base for 2003 onwards that will reach some good stable figures.
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