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Welcome to the Wise Seminar. It’s great to see so many of you here tonight. My name is Ben Peters, and I am the Chief Executive at Wise. My first important job as CEO is housekeeping. The exits are the big doorways on either side of the barn. The assembly point in the car park in the unlikely event of an emergency. The loos are to the left of bar, downstairs facility on the right. I was delighted to be asked by the board to fulfil the role of CEO last year. The main responsibility is to formulate and deliver our business plan. So what’s the plan? At its most basic, it is to give you the sort of service that we would expect to receive ourselves. That’s whether you’re getting financial advice as a private individual, investing in the multi- asset Wise Funds, or investing in our equity fund Evenlode, management of which is my day job. 2
We want you to leave the finances to us, so that you can focus on the things that matter to you. Tonight you’re going to hear some of the detail on how we will deliver on that aim. You’ll hear about our investment strategies, our people, and our operations. I’ll be available for Q&A at the end of the presentations, and to talk to you over drinks and food afterwards – I hope you will join me. Now I will hand over to our Chief Operations Officer, Alex Rae, who many of you will know. 3
At past seminars we have mainly talked about our funds but this year we thought we would also update you on Wise Investment as a company. In my presentation I will talk to you about Wise Investment being an Employee Owned company, I will tell you a bit about what has happened at Wise since the last seminar and lastly talk to you about an IT project that we are currently working on. 4
You may be aware that we became an employee owned company three years ago. In fact three years on help of everyone in the business, not just a small selection of people as might be the case in other economy, making it larger than the agricultural sector, to give you an idea of the size. An interesting fact is that Employee Owned businesses now accounts for around 4% of the UK rather than being told what to do by a parent company. mean that we can retain independence and carry on looking after our client the way we feel is best agreement of staff if we are ever going to be sold. And this is not going to happen! This in turn will original shareholders ( including Tony) decides to retire. In fact Wise Investment will need to have the employee owned means that we will not be in a position of having to sell the company when the Something that I know many of you have asked about is what will happen when Tony retires? Being organisations. engaged in the business we feel that we can continually work on improving how we do things with the Monday just gone. We are set up under exactly the same trust arrangement as the John Lewis people will mean that we can provide a better service to you. By having staff who are motivated and existing staff as well as recruiting good people into the company. Ultimately having a good team of What does this mean to you as a client? We feel that being employee owned is great both for retaining an input. very hard to make sure that everyone in the company really feel that they own the company and have We are getting involved in the EO Association, we do work internally on staff engagement and work This was originally a way of succession planning but has become much more than that. shareholder, and over time the trust will become a 100% shareholder. Partnership. In May 2013 the trust immediately owned 51% of the shares and so became a majority 5
Quite a lot has happened within the business over the last 18 months or so. Something that I feel is important to mention is that although you may now be dealing with a new as well and this is something all our staff value. We feel that it is important to make a positive impact on not only our clients but the wider community Theatre as well as doing fundraising for local charities and we aim to do more in this area in future. Enterprise, all staff can do a volunteer day for a charity and we sponsor the local Chipping Norton We have also introduced a corporate social responsibility programme, getting involved in Young We are working on improving our technology and I will talk more about this in a moment. business, this is something we value. new role. Apart from that we have not had an adviser leave. This means there is consistency across the adviser we have not had any advisers leave. Tony changed to fund manager only, me moving into a Our main aim is to continue looking after our clients in the same way we have always done. AUM totalled £425 million, now £740 million approximately. A huge part of this growth has come from provide the kind of service we want to our clients. We have also been working on our internal processes ensuring that as we grow we are still able to recommend us to your friends and families. This is really a big thank you to all of you who continue to do business with us and also continue to Chipping Norton company and will remain so. We have no plans to move the business elsewhere. We will be taking on further office space next door to the building we are currently in. We are a moment. We have increased our staff numbers from 18 to soon to be 32 and I will talk a bit more about this in a had. the success of Evenlode which has grown from £201 million to £530 million since the last seminar we 6
Since our last seminar in October 2014 we have grown significantly. As I mentioned staff numbers have gone from 18 to soon to be 32. This includes me moving into a new role, hiring two new advisers and boosting the technical team for client services, something Angus will talk more about in his presentation, hiring an IT manager to work across the whole company, two analysts on the Evenlode team, and a business development manager and an analyst for Tony’s funds. So growth has been across the business as a whole. We are growing and getter bigger but our main aim is to retain the same look and feel of Wise Investment as previously. We do not want to become a call centre type office and we are working very hard to ensure that regardless of how many staff we have you, our clients, will still feel like we are exactly the same as before and that you continue to deal with your own adviser and a small support team that knows you all well. 7
During the last year or so we have undertaken a big project to review our current IT systems, a better service in terms of the valuations that we can send out, which we know have not what you think! banners as you came in. We will be launching our new website shortly, please let us know business as well as the Funds business. You will have seen some of this new branding on the We have also worked on new branding for the company to incorporate both the Client We are aiming for the new system to be in place by the early part of 2017. have a more interactive way of using our system in meetings with you. been ideal. We will also have a much improved client log-in experience, and our advisers will advisers to use. So what will this mean for you as clients of Wise Investment? It should mean which we have named Big Tech. This is to ensure that we have a system that is fit for system that will include more detailed portfolio analysis and performance reporting for our The Big Tech project will mean upgrading the Client System that we use for a more modern in-house IT manager, Chris Rigbye. To help us with this project and also to support growing staff numbers we have taken on an we are compliant with new rules and regulations. Why are we doing this? We need to update our systems to keep competitive and ensure that need. purpose and that is going to provide us and our clients with all the functionality that we 8
I would like to reiterate that everything we do we do with all our clients in mind and hopefully you will feel that we are always working with your best interest at heart. This is something that is very important to us and we value greatly. If any of you have any suggestions for how we can improve things further or even let us know if there is something in particular you value that you don’t want us to change then please do let either your adviser know or speak to me. Wise Investment only exists thanks to all of you and we do appreciate every one of you. Thank you very much for listening. I am happy to discuss anything you might have queries about either later on this evening or please get in touch with me directly in the coming weeks. I will now pass over to Hugh who is one of the fund managers on Evenlode Income. 9
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