Peter Williams and Justin Barrett said they plan to remain in the Magazine Road offices that they occupied while they were doing business as Boston Direct Management until the current lease expires.
Williams and Barrett said they are being joined in their new venture by all of the staff who had worked for them at Boston Direct. Also coming with them are around 50 advisory clients, located mainly in Southeast Asia but also in such markets as the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Russia.
Williams and Barrett founded Boston Direct Management in 2003, along with two other partners who are no longer involved in the business.
They initially founded the company to provide white-label platform services to financial advisers based in Asia and beyond.
Williams said he and Barrett decided to form Capital Platforms after a three-year agreement that they had with Boston Direct Management to “run” the deVere Group’s platform business globally ended in December 2011.
“The agreement was an open one, but we wanted to create a new proposition that would make it possible for us to look after a broader spectrum of companies in the ever-growing offshore platform sector,” Williams, whose title at Capital is director, said.
It is understood that the new management of Boston Direct Management intends to continue to provide the technological support for deVere’s platform, which has the bulk of its management and IT operations in Malta.
A spokesman for deVere has confirmed that deVere is “not linked” to Capital Platforms, but did not provide further details, including whether, as rumoured, it has a stake in Boston Direct Management.
Records on file with Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority shows that Boston Direct Management has a single shareholder, a British Virgin Islands-incorporated entity known as Star Unison Ltd, and that its officers of record are Jonathan Mark Reed, a Briton, and Yahya Bin Hashim, a permanent resident of Singapore. Reed and Bn Hashim could not be reached for comment.
Boston Direct’s UK operation, in Brough, near Hull, in East Yorkshire, has been re-registered with the Financial Services Authority as Capital Advisory Group UK Ltd.
In the UK, Williams and Barrett face potential confusion with another platform provider, Capital Platform, which was founded in 2010 by Darren Beddard and specialises in providing IFAs and wealth managers with alternative investment strategies.
