Recent months have not been easy for the brokerage and wealth management house, but with a major outsourcing deal under its belt and some key appointments, it is looking to the future with more confidence.

WHIreland wants to boost its profile and take its wealth management and corporate broking offerings to another level as its new management team moves on from a challenging period for this UK-listed company.

At the start of June, the business inked a seven-year deal to outsource a number of wealth management functions to SEI Investments, a move the firm says will give it the freedom to significantly improve client service and efficiency in a way that is not affordable if these functions are done in-house.

With the financial and technology firepower that SEI brings, WHIreland can forge ahead in driving its wealth management offerings at a time when clients are ever more demanding, Roderick Buchanan, head of wealth management at the firm, told WealthBriefing in a recent interview alongside Richard Killingbeck, chief executive of the group.

“Partnering with SEI will allow us to enhance our service to clients, ensure that our regulatory obligations of the future are more easily met and to benefit from enhancements in the future development of systems and the overall control environment. SEI was chosen because of our strong cultural alignment based on serving the needs of investment clients, as well as their state-of-the-art technology and relationship-driven approach," Buchanan said.

The firm, along with many of its peers, is facing up to the brutal fact that without sufficient scale, spending on new IT systems is so expensive and time-consuming that it makes more sense to leave this to outside experts. SEI Investments and its peers such as Advent Software (now part of SS&C), State Street, SunGard and Avaloq aim to take on such work, freeing wealth managers to focus on where they can add value: advising clients about money.

For WHIreland, freedom to focus on true wealth management is part of how the firm aims to expand and put a difficult episode behind it. In February, the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK regulator, fined WHIreland £1.2 million (around $1.7 million) for failing to have controls in place to prevent market abuse. The firm was also restricted for 72 days from taking on new clients in its corporate broking division. (To see the full details of the case, click here.)

To ensure WHIreland runs a tight ship going forward, a significant recent appointment was the hiring in August of Marc Cane as group head of compliance and risk. Cane joined WHIreland from Ingenious Media, where he held the role of group compliance officer and money laundering reporting officer. He has held senior compliance roles at a number of financial institutions, including Permal Investment Management and JP Morgan Chase.

In July, the firm booked an operating loss before exceptional items of £1.1 million in the financial half year to the end of May versus a £300,000 profit in the same period of 2015. Explaining the situation, WHIreland spoke of a “moribund” UK stock market over fears surrounding Chinese growth, commodity price deflation and the “Brexit” referendum. There were one-off costs of around £600,000, stemming largely from the compliance department, including severance payments, legal and advisory fees and temporary employment costs. Rather more positively, the firm incurred legal costs connected to its seven-year agreement with SEI.

New faces
As part of the new start for WHIreland, it has made a number of senior appointments. In June, it promoted its deputy head of private clients, Buchanan, to head of wealth management. This shift allowed Killingbeck, who had held that role, to focus entirely on his chief executive function. (Killingbeck, formerly of Credit Suisse, has been at WHIreland for about four years.)

At the same time, Rupert Yeoward was made deputy head of wealth management, also in London. He spent the last two years as an independent wealth management consultant, having previously worked for Deutsche Bank and Rathbone Investment Management. The new role means he leads private wealth offices in Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Poole.

WHIreland at one stage had 17 offices across the country; an important element in the efficiency drive under Killingbeck has been shrinking that number to just seven offering wealth management services: London, Manchester, Isle of Man, Poole, Bristol, Cardiff and Milton Keynes .

This publication asked about the benefits from such a drastic overhaul of its office footprint.

"By reducing the number of offices, we have sought to reduce risk whilst simultaneously providing sound foundations for future expansion. Being relatively small, it is arguably easier to be responsive to change and thus directly pass on the benefit of this to our clients," Killingbeck said in the same interview.

One question is how, in a world that has seen wealth management upended by forces such as the Retail Distribution Review reform programme in the UK, a very traditional brokerage-cum-wealth management house such as WHIreland maintains a competitive edge against other, in some cases bigger, rivals. Over at the corporate broking side, the firm has the status of nominated advisor (Nomad) to firms seeking listings on London’s Alternative Investment Market. Periods of illiquidity on AIM have not been easy for some brokers; the number of Nomads has contracted to around 30 and the number of IPOs in the first half of the year was down on the strong end to 2015.

“During the summer our pipeline of new business has begun to build, which is encouraging for the second half of the year. Post Brexit, investors remain cautious but there is a growing appetite to discuss the individual merits of company capital raisings," Killingbeck said.

Corporates continue to demand services and are willing to pay for it, Killingbeck added. As banks have tightened lending standards, firms are seeking more help and solutions for raising capital, and WHIreland is well placed to work with clients.

”We cannot be complacent as other providers of capital have filled this banking void, but we are confident in our ability to raise capital for our existing clients and new clients," Killingbeck said.

At present, the firm employs slightly more than 200 people with around half of them working in the wealth segment.

"Our strategy is very firmly to grow and is likely to increase depending upon acquisitions," Killingbeck said. "With the benefit of supportive shareholders, we are seeking to grow by making the right acquisitions, in other words those that support our strategic ambitions within both the wealth management and corporate broking segments," he said.