Bowmore, a discretionary fund manager and financial planning firm, is targeting assets under management of £1bn within three years, aiming to grow via a combination of acquisitions and organic business wins.
The company’s chief executive, Mark Incledon, rebranded the firm from Citimark Partnership, which was a financial planning firm, to Bowmore, a discretionary wealth manager, back in 2020.
He said his rationale for moving into the discretionary space was his unhappiness at both the performance and the fee levels charged by the large discretionary firms.
Incledon said: “I noticed the financial rewards of some the senior people at those firms were very large, and I thought, well, they seem to be getting most of the rewards but we are doing most of the work.
"So on January 1, 2015, we moved £250mn we had with those firms onto our own platform and we ran it ourselves. To have done that with no real track record of our own was quite an achievement, but it shows how much our clients trusted us.”
The total assets under management of the business now sits at £400mn, with £300mn managed on a discretionary basis and another £100mn of legacy money - some of which is in VCT and EIS accounts, and some of which continues to be managed by Quilter and Brooks Macdonald.
The average Bowmore client portfolio is £1.1mn in size, with the largest having a portfolio of £15mn.
In terms of his expansion plans, Incledon said the aim is not to be a consolidator, but instead to buy firms who want something more bespoke for their clients.
Although Bowmore has both an advice practice and a wealth management practice, Incledon says clients are free to just use one of those services if they wish.
He has made something of a specialism in advising entreprenueurs who have recently sold a business on their financial planning.
He said: “I start out by asking them what their desired lifestyle is from that point on, and from there do a graph with their cash flow requirements.”
The firm is headquartered in the City of London now, having previously been based in Mayfair, but Incledon switched offices having realised that he could save £60,000 a year in rent.
Of the benefits of scale in investment management, he said: “The reality is that the way we manage money, if we ran £2bn we wouldn’t need more than 10 people.
"I think the next stage of development for our business is to develop a multi-family office approach, there is a gap between the traditional adviser and the private banks. The latter keep moving the goalposts in terms of what the minimum level of assets a client needs to have is, and that is creating a gap in the market.”
david.thorpe@ft.com
