Aviva Investors, the asset management division of insurance behemoth Aviva, saw its operating profits almost halve in the first six months of the year, from £60 million to £35 million on a year-on-year basis.

This compares to a respectable operating profit of £1.2 billion at the group level, just 11.6 percent down on the same period last year.

Nicholas Hyett, Equity Analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown said: “Aviva’s never been a terribly coherent whole. It’s not that the various businesses are incompatible, just that they’re not terrible complementary and have always been run pretty much independently. That’s left Amanda Blanc facing similar challenges to every other Aviva CEO of recent times.”

Regarding the performance of Aviva Investors, the firm said the decline in profits was due to capital market weakness, de-risking of asset strategies by internal clients and lower levels of private assets investments.

Aviva Investors said it had diversified its third-party client list and “maintained the positive customer momentum” seen in the second half of last year. Flows from external clients were £1.3 billion compared to outflows in the first half of 2019 and were driven by the UK and North America.

Mr Hyett added: “The group will be slimming down to focus on its core UK, Irish and Canadian business, pulling out of markets where it can’t generate returns while simultaneously “transforming performance” in the rest of the business. The words may be different, but it’s pretty much the same playbook Aviva’s been working from for years. Blanc will have some work to do at the full years to show why her plan will succeed where others have struggled.”

The good news for shareholders of Aviva is that dividends are back, something analysts hadn’t expected, but with a policy review coming up at the end of the year, and an ambition to cut debt, future payments are likely to be lower.