The CEO of Towry says there is space for a national wealth management organisation in the UK due to upheaval going on in the domestic sector.

There is a prize to be won: the mantle of a prominent, standalone national UK wealth manager.

That is the ambition of Rob Devey as he heads towards his first full year at the helm of Towry (formerly known as Towry Law), a firm going through an acquisition of Ashcourt Rowan (see here). After a period of consolidation and financial strengthening, he says Towry is now moving onto the “front foot”.

As some big banks have trimmed offerings for mass affluent clients and hiked minimum investment sizes in reaction to regulatory cost rises, it means there is an opportunity for a wealth management house, not beholden to a parent firm, to build a clearly national brand, Devey told this publication in a recent interview at his offices.

“I don’t think there are any particularly well known national brands….that is a space that could be filled,” Devey said. “This is all down to what you do,” he continued.

Devey said achieving such status will come down to consistent service and performance and in having that talked about widely among clients and advisors.

Towry is a firm looking to get more aggressive in how it drives its strategy forward after a period when the business was more focused on sorting out its structure, strengthening finances and its teams, he said. Devey, who joined in April 2014, says the past year has been more internally focused but that is starting to change.

When Devey came on board, he had to fill the shoes of Andrew Fisher, who had been at the helm for eight years and left last year. Recent times haven’t always been easy for Towry; the firm was fined £494,000 (around $769,000) by the-then UK regulator, the Financial Services Authority, in 2011, for failing to look properly after clients’ money. Towry also lost a prominent court case against Raymond James, the advisor group, over defections of former employees, in February 2012. But the firm since pushed forward, has made a number of hires across the UK, and in May last year, for example, signed a £70 million ($119 million) refinancing package to reduce its cost of capital and fund new acquisitions. The Ashcourt Rowan deal, which brings in a firm with about £5 billion of assets under management, adds to the current figure of around £6 billion at Towry. Towry has also bought Baker Tilly Financial and continues to make hires.

Dealing with such a rise in scale should come naturally to Devey, who has “big firm” experience, having previously been executive director of Prudential (the UK firm of that name, not the US one) and the CEO of Prudential UK & Europe from 2009-2013. Before that, he held senior roles at Lloyds Banking Group.

Towry’s recent announcement with Ashcourt Rowan is part of a trend of UK wealth management firms signing M&A deals in a period of consolidation. Other examples include Rathbone Brothers’ acquisition of the private client business of Jupiter, the coming together of Quilter and Cheviot Asset Management in 2013, and Schroders’ acquisition of Cazenove Capital Management in 2013. All of these firms are looking to exploit the sort of scale advantages that expanding size can bring. The past few years have also witnessed the rise of financial advisory networks and partnership-based business models, such as St James’s Place (which is now free from its old ownership stake via Lloyds Banking Group). And then of course there are those “robo-advisor” business models seeking – or hoping – to gatecrash the party. (See here.)

While the attractions of scale are clear to M&A parties, with any such deal a lot of focus will fall on how successful the acquirer is in bringing in as many assets as possible and keeping client attrition down. Avoiding disruption for existing clients of Ashcourt Rowan and Towry when a deal goes through is important because the wealth management and private banking sector has examples of how marriages haven’t always been harmonious, with clients sometimes having to be re-booked – sometimes a vexatious process.

The outright share purchase of Ashcourt Rowan means there is far less of an impact for the Ashcourt Rowan clients in terms of having to be “re-onboarded”, as can happen when a block of business is transferred from one entity to another, Devey said.

There is some overlap between the Towry and AR businesses, such as in AR’s large financial planning area. “There is a strong cultural alignment. They [Ashcourt Rowan] are financial planning-led wealth managers. Their discretionary investment management offering is a bit more bespoke than what we have at the moment at Towry,” he said.

Towry currently has unitised discretionary investment management and AR has a non-unitised DIM offering, which means Towry can bring in a new set of capabilities without having to build them in-house, which it had been thinking of doing before the deal came up, he said.

“Towry’s current DIM offering allows us to pool client assets which provide access to a very broad range of asset categories, including those such as alternatives which may have high minimum investment thresholds, and also provides capital gains tax deferment, as portfolio changes are made within the fund rather than at an individual level,” Devey said.

There are Towry clients who, for example, might have a variety of portfolios run by other managers; the Ashcourt Rowan capabilities now mean that such clients can bring that money over without having to put them into a unitised portfolio and hence creating a crystalised capital gain, which would be taxed.

“Clients need to have a menu of offerings,” he said.

With new pension savings freedoms (see here) kicking in for early April, firms are looking to develop a breadth of service offerings and expertise to capture this area of business – and Towry intends to be in the thick of it.

“Suddenly, people have a lot of choices to make,” Devey said.

Devey is also proud of how Towry’s reputation for strong advice has been officially recognised. The firm is one of very few national advisors that the courts recognise as able to offer recipients of personal injury payouts financial planning advice and an investment portfolio.

Towry’s forward advance, it appears, continues.