St James's PlaceMar 14 2018

How master of the art of persuasion Wilson built SJP

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How master of the art of persuasion Wilson built SJP

Mike Wilson was an easy person to like. According to those who knew him professionally he had a wicked sense of humour and would give his time to anybody who wanted his advice about the industry.

Mr Wilson, who died on 27 February at age 74 from cancer, was the former chief executive and ex-chairman of St James’s Place (SJP).

He co-founded the company – then called J Rothschild Assurance Group – in 1991 with Sir Mark Weinberg and Keith Carby.

Mark Lund, who was hired by Mr Wilson in 2004 to replace him as chief executive, said: “I regarded him as having one of the best insights into the sector that you could get. He was always very generous and happy to give you free advice and was just an amazing person, who would give his time to anybody who wanted advice about the industry.”

Mr Wilson was quite a character as the headline grabbing early days of SJP show.

The company was reportedly borne out of one of the biggest bidding battles of the late 1980s, when Jacob Rothschild along with tycoons James Goldsmith and Kerry Packer tried to mount a takeover of British and American Tobacco (BAT), which owned Allied Dunbar.

At the time Sir Mark sat on the boards of BAT and J Rothschild Holdings.

Years later, Mr Wilson explained that at the time Barclays had wanted to buy 51 per cent of Allied Dunbar, which appealed to him and Sir Mark, but BAT wanted to hold on to 51 per cent themselves, according to reports seen in the Guardian newspaper.

So the bid fell through, and Mr Wilson, who was chief executive at Allied Dunbar, followed its chairman Sir Mark out of the door.

Mr Carby, who was Allied’s ex-managing director also left not too long after.

And the three men joined forces in January 1992 to start J Rothschild Assurance (JRA), backed by Lord Rothschild and Scottish Amicable. The move also saw a raft of sales directors defect from Allied Dunbar to JRA. 

Just before the birth of JRA (later called St James’s Place) the financial services sector itself was going through a shift of its own. The Financial Services Act came into force in 1986. And several years later, the five self-regulating organisations (SROs), covering futures broking and dealing, financial intermediation, investment management, life assurance broking and securities broking were approved and overseen by the Securities and Investments Board (SIB), a regulator with statutory powers.

Regulatory years

Then into the early 1990s, regulation started to gain traction as self-regulation became increasingly diluted and a series of perceived regulatory failures led to a commitment to create a unitary single-tier watchdog.

By this time direct salesforces were in full swing. One of the biggest was the one being developed at Allied Dunbar, a business set up by Sir Mark, Lord Joel Joffe and Sir Sydney Lipworth.

Its business model was to recruit the best salespeople. It also pioneered the practice buyout concept, which promised a cheque to any adviser wanting to sell his business, thereby keeping the client book out of the independent sector.

When he left Allied Dunbar, Mr Wilson took some of these attributes to SJP. 

Early days

In those early days of SJP, Mr Carby and Mr Wilson carved out the blueprint for the business. 

Key Points

  • Mark Wilson co-founder of SJP died at the end of February.
  • His vision for the company was to improve the quality of the advisers and to undertake charitable work. 
  • Mr Wilson leaves behind a highly successful firm and a leader in the financial services sector.

They would bring in highly-skilled wealth managers on a self-employed basis, who would provide face-to-face advice, using a partnership model.

Mr Carby said: “We had experimented some years before with some employed advisers, so we wanted to continue with self-employed prospecting advisers, but we looked for ways – management being one – in which we could up the quality.

“We like to believe we were very careful in selection. We had a bee in our bonnet that financial services had been around for a long time, but we did not know much about our customers and we wanted to help advisers be better at marketing, not just selling.”

The Rothschild name was attractive to adviser partners joining the business so that by the time the company floated on the London Stock Exchange it had around 650 adviser partners.

Another attribute that Mr Wilson emulated was Allied Dunbar’s passion for charitable projects.

In an interview with think-tank Tomorrow’s Company in 2016, Mr Wilson said the vision he had for SJP was that the partnership would be regarded as the most trusted in the UK, while there would be an equal focus on giving back to the less fortunate.

The SJP Foundation, which was set up at the time that St James’s Place was founded, has to date raised and distributed more than £71.4m to thousands of charities.

Mr Carby said: “We did not just want to replicate Allied Dunbar, we wanted to keep the things we knew were essential to success and we wanted to make it even better, so that was more of our motivation than anything else.”

In between Allied Dunbar and SJP Mr Carby worked with Mr Wilson over a period of 17 years. Mr Wilson was SJP chairman from 2004 until 2011, after which he became foundation chairman and life president. Mr Carby said: “[Mr Wilson] was a very quick learner, extremely hard working, intelligent and a real master of the art of persuasion with interpersonal skills.”

Ian Price, presently divisional director of pensions at SJP, first met Mr Wilson in 1977 when he joined Allied Dunbar, when it was known as Hambro Life, as a 20-year-old.

He did not work closely with Mr Wilson then, but their paths crossed again in 2004, when Mr Price joined SJP.

And, in his capacity as chairman of SJP Foundation, Mr Wilson became his mentor.

One of the lasting memories that Mr Price has of Mr Wilson, is recently when both men and their wives went to dinner and Mr Wilson shared a pudding with Mr Price’s wife.

Mr Price said: “It made me smile. I was thinking about him the other day. Whenever he walked into any room, everyone would stop and smile. His gravitas was phenomenal and he had this ability of remembering your name, your partner’s name, and he always remembered something about them.

“He was a very key driving force behind the SJP Foundation and he was just brilliant in helping me understand the charitable world and he always had time for anybody. And he had this uncanny ability to make you feel like the most important person in the world.

“He has left a big legacy and I think a light in the industry has gone out. He had the ability to put everyone at ease but he was also a very shrewd businessman.”

And this shrewd business sense drove him to build SJP to become the biggest advice business in the UK, according to the 2017 Financial Adviser Top 100 Financial Adviser listings.

Success story

In its most recent results, SJP reported a jump in its profits for 2017 by nearly a third to £186m, after seeing record inflows.

The FTSE 100 firm saw record gross inflows of £14.6bn, taking its total funds under management to £90.7bn.

Net inflows were up 40 per cent to £9.5bn.

Its size and increase in profits, clearly a success by business standards, has sometimes drawn criticisms from rivals over high fees and lack of transparency.

But, many of those who remember Mr Wilson say he was proud of SJP, the SJP Foundation and the family he has left behind.

Ima Jackson-Obot is a features writer for Financial Adviser