Investment Quorum will be on the hunt for acquistions under new CEO Petronella West, who is looking to boost the wealth manager’s existing £250m assets under management.
“We are very much interested in acquisitions,” West told Portfolio Adviser.
“We will be looking out for client books but only the right ones. You need to keep your business well run and quite tight and I think if you do that, you can get through the regulatory storm and there’s quite bit of that right now.”
Following Lee Robertson’s departure in a management buyout, she said it is important that 90% of the firm’s staff are now shareholders.
She said: “We are looking at acquisitions. The cheques are bigger, people are offering a lot of money for good firms.
“We aim to reach £600m in five years, time with some modest acquisitions.”
Regulatory challenges for wealth managers
Speaking to Portfolio Adviser, West said “regulatory interference” is one of the key challenges within the wealth management industry today.
She said: “I’m not dissing the interference because I see so much bad investment advice being given despite RDR.
“But Mifid II, the senior managers regime – these are all there to try and scare you. However, if you run your business well, they don’t scare you. If you do the right thing all the time, by your clients, it shouldn’t scare you.”
She said it is going to also be a very challenging space for fees as firms will need to be clear about propositions and very well organised.
West added that while the firm hasn’t faced any regulatory issues, she is empathetic with the issue.
Women in financial services
Discussing her view on the lack of women in senior leadership, West said: “Our head of operations is a woman, the CEO is a woman, the head of our client services is a woman and there’s three girls on our ops team.
“I will support working women 100% because there aren’t enough, and you need to be identifying them young. You have to accept that women have babies and you have to work around it. It’s down to women who want to have children, if they want to have a career, and if they do then you have to try and fine tune that.”
West said she compromised and sacrificed when she had children of her own.
“If you’ve got talent and you want to have children and you want to go back to work, then you just need to focus quite hard on how you’re going to do that but if you want to have 2 years off for a baby but you want to keep a career – it’s going to be hard.”
She added: “There’s always pain if you want to bring up children as a working woman. However, I’d like to think that this is an issue of the past in ten years’ time.
“There’s a lot of things that need to be overcome, equally as much as I accept that women want to stay at home and look after their children and that’s great but equally if you want to stay at home and look after children and then come back to work then it’s going to be quite hard.
“So while the women situation is heavily debated but I’ve proved you can make it so it’s possible.”
