It’s approaching 10 o’clock and Sanlam private wealth boss Penny Lovell is running late for our interview. She’s been stuck on the Northern line. Moments later she whirls into the room, clutching a folder bursting with documents in one hand and a bottle of ballet pink nail varnish in the other. Deeply apologetic, she sets both down on the table, removing four or five pages of notes from her folder and spreading them across the table. “I’ve done my homework,” she says emphatically.
Lovell is in somewhat of a unique position in the private wealth space. She is one of a small handful of female CEOs in the industry. Thirty-one years ago, when she started out as a graduate trainee broker consultant for Friends Provident – now part of Aviva – she reckons she was probably the only woman. When she went on maternity leave in 2002 while working for Fleming Family and Partners, they suddenly had to create a maternity policy.
Lovell says she “fell in love” with investment, savings and pensions on the graduate milkround circuit. Originally, she had dreamt of being a TV news producer. She cut her teeth in TV and broadcasting when she was only 11 years old, doing various stints for hospital radio and BBC Radio Manchester. But at university she realised she was probably better suited to a career in finance.
Actually, that’s not the whole truth. Lovell considers a moment, “I think it was probably inspiration from my mother.” As a little girl, her mum was fascinated by investments. She even had a sign on her bedroom door that read ‘fund manager’.
“My job at home, because my mum was such a passionate investor, was to monitor the share prices,” Lovell explains. “Wherever she was in the house, she’d be screaming out, ‘What’s BT doing?’ and ‘What’s going on here?’ and so I became really engaged.”
Monitoring share prices on Ceefax turned to talks with her mum about the importance of having a runaway fund, saving for the future and the first principle of investing – compound growth.
Lovell remembers her mother taking her, aged six or seven, from their home in Leicester for a tour of the City of London, which included wandering round the London Stock Exchange. “I remember standing on the balcony looking over at all these figures bustling around in their lovely coloured jackets, just thinking, ‘I want to be a part of this’.”
Reaching out
Lovell realises most people are not as adamant as her mother about their savings. A large part of her work on the board of the Personal Investment Management and Financial Advice Association is thinking about ways to make financial education part of the school curriculum.
“It comes back to a much bigger question about our industry and ourselves, in that I don’t think we’ve ever spoken properly to people about how to save, how to invest and the benefits of it,” she says.
“It’s always been a world that some people feel they can’t be a part of. Why is it when I go out to a party, when everybody else talks about what they do, be it they work for Google or they are in fashion or journalism, everyone gets engaged? But when I say I work in wealth management, helping people with their savings, investments and pensions, people tend to turn off a little bit.
“We often say it’s because they feel they haven’t got enough money to invest but I think we’ve just got the language wrong and haven’t made it human,” she says.
Family values
Working in a family office for much of her career gave Lovell a good perspective on advising clients that have different pot sizes. Though she was looking after families with billions of pounds in assets, within those families she would also have to think about “the youngsters”, who could have as little as between £20,000 and £50,000.
“We’re very lucky at Sanlam, in that we have funds and solutions that can cater for somebody coming to us with £25,000, and we have funds and an institutional approach that will enable a family office or a larger family to come to us with £30m, £100m or £150m.”
The core client base of Sanlam’s private wealth business has between £300,000 and £3m. So far the business has amassed £2.7bn in client assets, a fraction of the £45.7bn assets held globally by Sanlam.
Founded in 1918, the South African-based parent company has a rich history, but Lovell says it is far from a household name in the UK. Sanlam UK chief executive Jonathan Polin has been trying to change that by transforming the British arm of the business into a vertically integrated wealth manager.
Polin has merged the wealth and planning divisions into a single service and been pursuing a highly acquisitive strategy, last year snapping up four adviser businesses, including Thesis Asset Management. Sanlam UK now has 60 financial planners and 33 portfolio managers.
“I’m using the financial planners and portfolio managers to help me put together my journey for the next 10, 20, 30 years, because my mum’s beginning to lose interest,” Lovell says, laughing. “She’s given up on me.”
Having a South African parent gives the firm more of a global outlook than some of its domestic-based rivals, which is reflected across strategies such as the £517m Sanlam Global High Quality Fund, run by global equities head Pieter Fouries, or Mike Pinggera’s £258m Real Assets Fund.
“What’s important is that we are less affected by cyclical events. So, with things going on like the coronavirus outbreak, we feel quite secure.”
A fine filter
Sanlam’s fund managers, researchers and analysts feed the private wealth business’s investment engine. Phil Smeaton, who Lovell likes to refer to as the “Herculean CIO”, distils the research and analysis from the in-house fund range to create the asset allocation for Private Wealth’s discretionary fund management portfolios.
“Everything has to earn its place in the portfolio. So, there’s nothing in a DFM portfolio that hasn’t earned its place through research, analysis and how we think about things.
“Ethical, ESG and impact are other complicated uses of language we’ve managed to bring into our culture,” Lovell says.
Sanlam forged a partnership with ESG research and ratings agency Sustainalytics last July to fully integrate ethical and sustainable investing practices into its investment approach.
The parent company has been at the forefront of corporate social responsibility in Africa, from doing community outreach in areas hit hardest by HIV and poverty, to contributing to the Black Economic Empowerment initiative that aims to redress the inequalities of Apartheid, as well as investing in education and infrastructure.
“In the same way as I walk around a supermarket now and differentiate what goes into my shopping basket and how much plastic is wrapped around my bananas, I expect people will start thinking more and more about how we save and invest,” she says. “It’s a big part of how we think here at Sanlam.”
Gender neutral
With International Women’s Day fast approaching, I am curious to hear whether Lovell believes things have improved for women in finance. “I’m slightly controversial,” she admits.
She thinks the conversation has “become a lot about females thinking about themselves and what they should have when it comes to different rights”, which has detracted attention from the ultimate goal of working hard for the client.
“I am gender blind,” she tells me. “I was laughing at a presentation the other day about not noticing whether I’m a man or a woman anymore. Either way, it just doesn’t occur to me.”
It’s here that I point out financial services has one of the worst gender pay gaps of any industry in the UK. Wealth management firms have been called out for having very few women at the top, with the worst offenders accused of fostering a toxic, macho culture that is stuck in the past in which women feel alienated and excluded.
Lovell says, personally, she hasn’t suffered. “I’ve met most men in the City now, and over the past 31 years probably most men working in financial services across the UK. All I’ve found is really supportive teams, lots of laughs, lots of fun.”
She recalls how once a close friend and “very senior guy in the City” made her stand on London Bridge early in the morning to watch the people going by.
“He said, ‘That man’s wife is going to die next week, this one is about to lose his job, she doesn’t know it yet but she’s about to have twins, she’s about to get a promotion’. The lesson he was trying to teach me is that we are all human beings, we’ve all got issues,” she states.
“I think we need to stop looking inside ourselves as women and all go and stand on London Bridge in the morning and watch all of the people going by and think about everybody’s needs.”
