According to Ravenscroft non-executive chairman Stephen Lansdown, the billionaire founder of the UK’s biggest independent private client brokerage, Hargreaves Lansdown (HL), financial services in this country has “lost its mojo”.
Lansdown believes a raft of measures, including Mifid II and the FCA’s asset management and platform studies, have led the industry to become too focused on regulation and not enough on the most important piece of the puzzle: the end client.
“All those things drag you down because there is something else you need to deal with when all you want to do is focus on clients,” he says. “I think the financial services industry has forgotten it has to look after clients.
“People would argue [the regulator] is protecting the investor, but actually all it is doing is protecting the investor so much that they are never going to make a proper investment decision again if we’re not careful.”
The art of delivering good client service is something Lansdown knows only too well. After all, HL, the firm he and Peter Hargreaves launched in 1981 from Bristol, has become a FTSE 100 behemoth with a market cap of £7.3bn and is a household name in financial services.
But that was then. Lansdown stood down from the board of HL in August 2010 when he moved to Guernsey and despite still owning 12.3% of the broker, he has distanced himself in recent years. In September he sold a further £190m stake (13 million shares) in the firm.
He remained a non-executive until 2012, but admits the last couple of years were not easy. “Being a non-executive of a company you founded and ran for 30 years is the most painful experience in the world,” he says.
After moving to Guernsey, Lansdown received “plenty of offers” from companies seeking to secure the platform mogul’s capital, but only one caught his eye as offering the potential to grow and deliver the top quality customer service he felt was lacking in the industry. Step forward Ravenscroft.
“The team is very infectious and you can see the talent and the potential,” he says. “The attraction to me was if I could help them fulfil that then the business can grow.
“What we are providing is something I’m not sure the UK has seen for a while: a fresh approach and new fund range into the UK market. What I see as attractive is finding a growing new fund I can invest into and participate in the leverage that can give you, rather than investing later.”
As such, Lansdown became a shareholder in December 2012 and was appointed a non-executive chairman in September 2015. He now owns 28% of the company.
Mixing business and pleasure
Ravenscroft was founded by Jon Ravenscroft in 2005 as a private client stockbroker called Cenkos Channel Islands. Mark Bousfield, managing director of Ravenscroft, says somewhat tongue in cheek that back then it was “just a handful of people and a dream”.
Twelve years later, the firm has a headcount of more than 80, offices in Jersey, Guernsey, Peterborough and, most recently, London, and £2.87bn assets under management. It has big ambitions to expand into the UK onshore wealth market, yet remains a close-knit organisation with more or less every employee either owning a share of the business or investing in the firm’s Huntress range of funds, or both.
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