Challenger Financial Services Group chief executive Mike Tilley said yesterday that the group remains committed to the development of its mortgage aggregation business, after announcing that the company had reached agreement with AXA Asia Pacific to sell its financial planning businesses.AXA has agreed to pay $150 million for Genesys Wealth Advisers and Synergy Capital Management. In a parallel deal AXA will sell its $1.3 billion annuity portfolio to Challenger.The announcement prompted suggestions that Challenger may be looking to sell out of its other distribution business, mortgage aggregation. The group owns or has investments in three aggregators - Choice, Fast and Plan - and has an investment in the lender Homeloans.Challenger has said previously that it would take its stake in Plan from 15 to 100 per cent later this year. Tilley said that was still his intention.Tilley said: "The decision to go into mortgage broker aggregation has been a separate strategy and has nothing to do with our decisions around financial planning. There is no synergy between those businesses."We were aware that other financial planners were doing mortgage broking and were looking for ways to bring the two distribution streams together, but we never thought they would go together and we have not seen anyone make any money out of it."AXA will acquire 350 planners and $12 billion of funds under advice. Challenger had been in financial planning for some time through its ownership of a group called Garrison. Garrison was losing money and in 2004 the then Challenger CEO Chris Cuffe bought Associated Planners to beef up the business. The merged companies were renamed Genesys.When Tilley was appointed CEO in August 2004 the question of what to do with financial planning was still to be resolved. The business lost $7 million pre-tax in 2004.  By June 2006 the loss was $3 million pre-tax and Tilley made it known the business was not strategic and would be sold at the right time. It is a profitable business today but Tilley does not regret the decision to sell. "We have 350 planners. The big groups have 1200 to 1800 planners. There was nothing for us to buy to get to that size."And we never felt that financial planning and mortgage broking aligned. The customer bases are too different. Planners deal with people over 45 and brokers deal with people under 45."Following the announcement of the sale Challenger confirmed its guidance for the 2008 financial year. Statutory net profit is expected to be $20 million on the back of normalised pre-tax earnings of $270 million. The company expects to report a number of significant items, including impairment of investments in third party businesses and mark-to-market revaluations.