Four individuals, including three senior staff from Canaccord Genuity, have collaborated to launch their own Western Australian wealth management firm.
Leeuwin Wealth has been launched this month focusing on offering dedicated wealth management and corporate finance services to Western Australian individuals and companies.
The four founders are managing director Jane Tandy, head of financial advice Jason Featherby, head of institutional sales Michael Brindal, and corporate finance specialist Aaron Constantine, plus five other members of staff to build out the team.
Tandy, Brindal and Constantine all worked at Canaccord Genuity as chief operating officer, director of wealth management and managing director for investment banking respectively, while Featherby was a director at Western Australian financial services firm Knight Group.
Rather than starting from scratch, the firm has been set up with the existing client book of Featherby which means it already looks after $500 million and 220 clients. Its target demographic is high-net-worth clients with $250,000 for financial planning and Western Australia-listed companies for its corporate finance services.
Speaking to Money Management, Tandy said the firm is keen to ensure it maintains its Western Australia presence at a time when firms are being snapped up by east coast counterparts. The Leeuwin name comes from the Western Australia location Cape Leeuwin and the ocean flow Leeuwin Current.
“We’ve all come from big firms and were looking for something more small and bespoke that was focused in Western Australia. Quite a few WA firms over the last few years have been taken over by east coast or global firms so a lot of traditional, parochial WA firms have disappeared from the market. We thought there was an opportunity to have a firm dedicated to WA.”
Last October, AZ NGA took a stake in Perth advice firm The Wealth Designers while Sydney-based PSK Private Wealth acquired Perth advice business Sage Financial Group as its first WA firm.
Regarding the opportunity to run a small business compared to working at a large player, she said: “It is really different to being in a big firm, we have a tighter team in one office so there is less travel and it is easier to collaborate with staff and clients. But we also have fewer resources available and I have to wear many hats rather than having a deep specialisation.
“It’s a great time for wealth management. There are more opportunities than challenges right now. A lot of people need advice and we can provide that. We want to service both retail and wholesale clients. Some firms say it’s too hard to service retail clients from a cost perspective and are moving away from that, but we think it’s really important and you can do it if you have good technology and systems underpinning it.”
In her role focused on operations, Tandy oversees technology implementation and client experience at the business.
Discussing what is important to her from an operations perspective when it comes to launching the business she said: “The most important thing is about people. It’s about having the right staff to provide the right service based on what the clients want. It’s about thinking how we can build technology, getting the right staff to build it and having a client-centric approach.
“When you have legacy systems and legacy accounts, it becomes very hard so one of the benefits of setting up a new business is that we can create systems based on what’s available today so we don’t have to rely on legacy systems.
“We have outsourced paraplanning, outsourced IT, outsourced our clearing and execution services. If you have a solid outsourcing policy in place and a review and audit of your services, then it’s definitely a way to build up the business until it makes sense to bring it back in-house. It’s about watching the metrics and waiting for the tipping point to bring it in-house. Just because you implement outsourcing at the beginning of the journey doesn’t mean you have to stick with it the whole time.”
Looking ahead, Tandy says Leeuwin would like to have 20–30 staff and to remain dedicated to its Western Australia community.
