Stephen Bird, chief executive of Standard Life Aberdeen, or Abrdn as it is now to be known, has long been a digital evangelist.
Bird joined the asset manager last year from Citi, where he was chief executive of global consumer banking.
Speaking to Euromoney in 2017, Bird explained: “The journey to becoming a future-proof, truly digital bank is as much about transforming culture as it is about transforming underlying technology.”
He found this out the hard way last month.
Vowel play
Announcing the fund manager’s largely vowel-less rebrand to widespread incredulity and mirth, he insisted that the new name was a “modern, agile, digitally enabled brand”, as well as describing it as dynamic and engaging.
Most of the initial engagement involved checking the date of the announcement to make sure it was the end of April, rather than the very beginning.
Bird had engaged brand consultancy Wolff Olins to come up with the new name, the same agency that devised PwC’s ill-fated ‘Monday’ rebranding in 2002.
Perhaps the creatives are enjoying an in-joke on this one: Abrdn is, of course, an anagram of the word ‘brand’.
Quite what Bird has against the letter ‘e’ remains unclear, but his former banking colleagues must be relieved that he reserved his war on vowels until he had left the industry. Otherwise, they could possibly have found themselves working for Ct one day.
And huge sighs of relief can be heard from Geneva, where one of the large Swiss banks has dodged being rebranded as BS.
