Last year, SLA offloaded its insurance arm, Standard Life Assurance, to Phoenix for £3.28mln, as part of a strategy to streamline the business after Standard Life and Aberdeen merged. As part of the deal, SLA took a 20% stake in Phoenix. However, Barclays said the potential scale of the benefit of the relationship between SLA and Phoenix remains uncertainty. Following the disposal of Standard Life Assurance, the group has been reconfiguring its balance sheet but Barclays said the process remains ongoing with the exact level of excess capital at SLA continuing to fluctuate.