DAVID BOWEN spent the first decade of his career in investment management. But he came to realise that financial planning provides far more value. He has now set up his own financial planning business, rockwealth Edinburgh, and says he couldn’t wait to get started.

David, how did you first get into financial services?

I started out as an investment manager at an old-fashioned stockbroking firm that was moving towards investment management. I especially enjoyed dealing with clients. I worked with a lot of financial advisers at that time, and I saw quite early on that they were adding more value than the investment managers were!

So I eventually transitioned across to financial planning, and I’ve got to thank my former employers Brewin Dolphin for allowing me to do that. Originally, I was just doing the financial planning qualifications out of interest, to learn more. But what studying for those qualifications made me realise is that the truly valuable discussions advisers have with clients are about financial planning, and therefore everything should be planning-led.

After a brief spell at Rathbones, I ended up working at Investec Wealth & Investment for the next four-and-a-half years. I managed Investec Wealth’s high-net-worth clients, and I also managed the Edinburgh team of financial planners.

 

You clearly had a successful career at Investec. Why did you leave?

When I joined Investec Wealth, they were independent, but they later moved to restricted advice. I wanted to go back to being independent and to focus on financial planning.

The master plan was always to move on and set up my own business, but I didn’t want to be all on my own, which is why joining the rockwealth family of advisers really appealed to me. We’ve got a really supportive team here, so it doesn’t feel like I’m on my own. We all help each other.

 

What else was it about rockwealth that appealed?

I spoke to a couple of other adviser networks, and there were a number of non-negotiables for me. It had to be an independent advice firm. It also needed to have a clean and clear investment proposition.

The most important thing for me, though, was that the firm I chose to work with had to charge fixed fees, rather than percentage fees. I’ve always struggled with the idea of clients with larger portfolios — say, £1 million upwards — paying significantly higher fees. In theory, advisers provide the same, or at least a similar, service for those people as they do for the rest of their clients; it’s just that they might have a couple of extra zeros at the end of their assets under management. 

Anyway, I met with Tim Horrocks, the founding partner, and with Lloyd Davies, who runs rockwealth Aberdeen, and it just sort of all came together. I thought, why reinvent the wheel by becoming an appointed representative of another network when this was exactly what I wanted to offer to my own clients?

 

How excited are you to be launching rockwealth Edinburgh?

My wife gives me a hard time about not being particularly animated, so this is about as excited and as animated as I get!

For the last few years I felt lost as although I was helping clients, I felt there could be more that I could be doing for many of them. At times, some interactions with clients were more transactional, which didn’t bring with it the full benefits of financial planning. That’s completely changed overnight, because I now see that I really can add value for people and look after them properly. That’s what I’m most excited about.

 

So what is it about financial planning that you most enjoy?

It’s helping people. It’s coming to the end of a discovery meeting and realising that I really can make a difference in that person’s life. There’s nothing quite like that. 

Good financial planning creates a really positive feeling, not just for me, of course, but for the clients as well. They finally see their plans coming together after years of hard work, squirrelling away money into pensions and other savings. That’s when they realise that they’re going to have enough money to do what they want to do, whether that’s thoroughly enjoying retirement, helping loved ones or whatever.

Something else I like about the job is that, as well as the individual client, I also get to work with their family. Financial planning can make a big difference for entire families.

 

For you, what makes for a first-class financial planner?

There are two aspects to that. One is the technical aspect, which some advisers oversell and others undersell. The way I look at it is that technical expertise is a given. If you go and see a doctor you’d expect them to know what they’re talking about, and you should expect the same of a financial planner.

So advisers have to enjoy, and thoroughly understand, the technical side of the job. Personally, I’m a bit of a geek. I really enjoy that aspect, and of course I also understand it very well.

At the same time, though, a planner also needs to be good at the other side of the job, which is being able to listen to people and empathise with them in order to help them.

I try to apply an 80-20 rule to client meetings, particularly discovery meetings. That means spending roughly 20 percent of the time talking, and 80 percent of the time listening. I want the client to feel comfortable telling me about their hopes and dreams. I also want them to open up about the family’s finances and to explain what it is they want to achieve. A planner has to be able to pull and prod, ask the right questions and listen carefully, so they get all of the information they need for putting a plan together.

 

rockwealth has an evidence-based investment philosophy. What are your thoughts on EBI?

As I say, I was an investment manager for about the first decade of my career. So active management is my background. I think I did OK as an investment manager. I wouldn’t say I did it particularly well or particularly badly. But I started in 2004, when there was a bull market, and anyone could have done a decent job at that time. Then came the financial crisis, when everyone did a pretty bad job!

I think I moved away from active management because I didn’t really trust myself to do as good a job as I wanted for clients. When you work in that industry, you see a lot of people with very strong opinions. At the start of your career, when you’re a bit wet behind the ears, you listen to them and assume that, just because they’re expressing themselves confidently, they must know what they’re talking about. Then maybe you look into it a little more and realise they might not know what they’re talking about — they’re just shouting a little bit louder than everyone else. The bottom line is, it’s a market, so there are always two sides to a trade or to a discussion point. 

So evidence-based investing sort of came to me gradually, and I now fully believe in it. For a start, it takes a lot of the behavioural biases out of investing, such as overconfidence.

Something I was always particularly guilty of, along with many others in investment management, is trying to time the market. It’s impossible. Nobody rings a bell at the top or at the bottom. As the old saying goes, it’s time in, not timing, the market that counts.

 

Investors were given another lesson on the folly of market timing when markets fell at the start of August, weren’t they?

That’s right. Prices fell sharply on the Friday and then again on the following Monday. But they had more or less recovered by the end of the week. The Japanese market fell 12 percent on the Monday but then rebounded the very next day. 

It just shows, yet again, that you have to be very, very lucky to jump out of the market and then back in again at just the right time. Otherwise you end up looking very, very stupid to have tried it at all. You’re never going to get it just right.

 

IFA and Financial Adviser in Edinburgh

rockwealth Edinburgh is an evidence-based and fixed-fee Independent Financial Adviser situated in Edinburgh, Scotland.

About Us: Located in the historic heart of Edinburgh, rockwealth Edinburgh is your committed local financial planning firm. We provide a wide range of financial services, including personalised financial advice, detailed pension and retirement planning, investment strategies, and inheritance tax planning, all designed to support your financial journey in Edinburgh and across the wider region.

Interested to work with us?: Begin your financial journey with us through an Initial Discovery Consultation, completely free of charge and without any obligation. You can visit us at our office, schedule a video call, or call us on:  0131 3928822.

Discover rockwealth Edinburgh at: rockwealth Edinburgh, 5 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AN.