From there, Bishop was part of a four man team that launched the UBS wealth management operation in London, where it had previously not had a presence, with the support of the Swiss parent company.
He says this was great professional experience as “the four of us had to do everything really at the start, client communications, investment management, administration, all of it, and so I am really an accidental wealth management professional.”
By the time he left the company in 2022, the wealth management unit he had helped to co-found had 650 employees.
While the two environments are very different from each other, Bishop says client needs tend to be similar, and in both cases he is trying to grow a business in a competitive marketplace.
He has also taken some of the practices of the bigger firm into WH Ireland, creating the role of chief investment officer and an office headed by that person, with research staff and a separate budget.
Bishop says this is part of a plan to make the investment management unit “institutional quality”, which he says is easier as a result of consumer duty.
Cookie cutting
The wealth management division lost money in the most recent set of WH Ireland accounts, and that was prior to the market turbulence of recent months.
He says WH Ireland came into last year “almost as much underweight to bonds as we could be” and this helped to preserve assets, but one of the long-standing goals of the firm is to reach AUM of £3bn, which requires significant growth from here.
Much of the capacity within that chief investment office came with the acquisition of Harpsden Wealth in 2020, which added a combined £390mn of assets.
He has also hired people to work within the wealth management business, people poached from other firms.
Bishop says that while his firm is keen to do more acquisitions, “we don’t really want to do any unless we are profitable. We have spoken to a couple of firms, but the firms in question weren’t right for us. We want firms on a similar scale to Harpsden or a little bigger; we indicate to firms that may be for sale that we are in the market, but we are not consolidators.”
The extent to which some of the growth will have to come from acquisition if he is to hit his £3bn target within the foreseeable future can be seen in his view that, with AUM presently around £2bn, “realistically the most a firm of that size can expect in a year is inflows of £50mn-£100mn.”
