The new UK operation is being branded THG Wealth Management UK, and was due to open its doors initially in the St James’s Place offices in Bristol, at the beginning of July.
Stephen Brooks, one of the Henley Group’s senior Singapore consultants, is to head up the new office as managing director.
The Henley Group is one of Asia’s largest expat-focused advisory firms, with offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, while St James’s Place is a FTSE 250-listed partnership, with some £39bn worth of client funds under management.
Henley Group founder and chairman Antony Michell noted that the new office makes the company one of the few offshore practices, thus far, to establish a presence in the UK, the original home of the majority of his company’s 4,000-plus clients.
Other expat firms that have done so in recent years include the Zurich-based deVere Group, and Gibraltar-based Totus Wealth Management.
Earlier this year, Ian Gorham, chief executive of Hargreaves Lansdown, the Bristol-based, FTSE 100-listed UK investment ‘supermarket’, was quoted as saying that his company was “eyeing up opportunities to expand overseas” in the “next three to five years”.
Industry observers say the growth of regulations governing the way advisers operate in many markets is increasingly forcing wealth managers to establish locally regulated offices in the countries in which their clients live currently, not just where they used to be resident, or expect to be again one day.
Furthermore, Michell noted, a trend for expats to stay abroad longer than was typical in the past means that by the time many of them do return – as he says the majority still expect to – they have accumulated more in the way of offshore assets than used to be the norm, thus presenting more potential wealth-structuring challenges for their advisers.
For this reason, Michell said, THG is looking to employ a highly-experienced UK team with a “considerable understanding of both the onshore UK and offshore financial markets”.
The opening of the new Henley Group outpost is the latest in a series of developments at the company, which also include the recent introduction of an optional fee-based service for its Asian clients, and which follows a strategic review of the company’s business that was prompted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s announcement of plans to tighten up on the advisory industry’s regulations.
In April, the Henley Group relocated its Hong Kong offices to larger quarters that, by coincidence, happened to be in the Henley Building, on Queen’s Road Central.
