WH Ireland’s wealth management boss Michael Bishop continues to target £3bn under management in his unit, but doesn’t expect to make any acquisitions until the business is profitable.
In its most recent set of results, released last month, the wealth management unit revealed a loss of £2m for the year to March 31, 2022, compared with a loss of £887,000 in the previous year.
Bishop only joined the firm in February 2022, but said the main reason for the increased losses was the cost of the acquisition of Harpsden, an advice firm it acquired in 2020. Stripping out the costs associated with that, the losses were £248,000 compared with £79,000 previously, he said.
Bishop’s predecessor Steve Ford had previously told FTAdviser he expected the unit to grow its AUM to £3bn in the coming years, from £1.6bn at the end of March. Of that, £1bn is managed on a discretionary basis.
Bishop has now said: “We expect the £3bn target to be hit, whether in the near term, or further into the future, at least partly as a result of an acquisition. We are talking to our shareholders, our board of directors and our executive committee about acquisitions.
"But we need to grow organically, to get to sustained profitability, before we can start to grow inorganically."
Bishop added: "We are very, very close to achieving profitability this year, and then we can start on acquisitions, we are looking at them now, we are talking about them now, but I doubt we will be finalising the terms of any acquisition if we are not in profit. We are discussing and looking at acquisition ideas now, rather than waiting for someone to approach us, as happened in the past.”
Bishop joined WH Ireland after twenty tears at UBS, and said that both advice and investment management businesses “are in play” as potential takeover targets.
He is very keen on the business model of financial planning firms, noting their revenue tended to be more resilient in times of market strife than was the case with investment management firms, whose revenue was more likely to be linked to market performance.
He said: “I think all investment firms should own a financial planning business.”
Bishop is focused on improving the technological capability of his firm, such as allowing clients to view their portfolios in an app in real time. “I know we wouldn’t be first to the market with that,” he said, but argued that human interaction would be an ongoing part of the financial planning process.
He said: “When we look at the next generation of clients, the children and grandchildren of today’s clients, who have maybe been gifted money, those guys are technologically dependent and they are going to want to be able to interact with technology when they look at their portfolios.
"And this is something I am working on, but I think the next phase, actually providing the advice through the technology, I am not sue about that.
"The biggest challenge in my job here is, we have lots of people here who really care about doing their best for the clients, but the business has not always been set up to allow them to do that.”
david.thorpe@ft.com
