LOM Financial Ltd made a full-year profit of $306,891 for 2014, up more than 70 per cent on the previous year’s $180,284.

However, the financial services company reports that the brokerage side of the business is under pressure from falling commissions and increased regulation. And ongoing IT projects linked to its office in Bristol, England, which became fully operational last summer, will likely push back cost savings from that move to next year.

The company’s book value, as of December 31, was $2.71 per share.

Chairman and CEO Scott Lines, in a statement said he did not feel the improved profit was “an adequate return on the capital employed in the business and therefore we will continue to focus on maintaining strict cost controls whilst growing our asset base and revenues”.

Commenting on the company’s 2014 performance, he said: “We witnessed some revenue growth in our brokerage operations and essentially a flat performance from asset management revenues. With the sharp decline in our foreign exchange revenues we thus managed only a small increase in overall revenues.”

Growth in the discretionary asset management division remains a priority, he said. Mr Lines noted that during the past five years LOM’s Global Equity Fund had returned 42.81 per cent net, while the Bloomberg Global Equity Offshore Universe, a peer group competitor, returned 19.47 per cent.

The company is continuing work to improve its brokerage operation in Bermuda, including enhancing its online trading system.

Mr Lines added: “An area that we plan to expand is the ability for our customers to have specific foreign exchange trading accounts in order to perform foreign exchange transactions simply and at better rates than currently exist locally.”

The group’s assets under administration had risen to $678 million by the end of the first quarter, having stood at $615 million on December 31.

Year-on-year, LOM’s total revenues improved 1.3 per cent to $7,385,149, while total operating expenses remained unchanged.

Looking at the outlook for global markets, Mr Lines said the company expects to see the US Fed Reserve begin to slowly raise interest rates by the end of the summer.

Mr Lines also said: “Our outlook for global equity markets has become more cautious.

“We are concerned that market valuations are not cheap, investor confidence is high and that there have not been any significant corrections in the market for several years.

“Over the coming years we believe that stock market returns are going to become more volatile as they face the normalisation of interest rates.”

As business activity remains subdued the LOM’s board of directors of LOM have decided not to pay a dividend.