1 minute read
Stanford Brown
Stanford Brown is a financial advice firm established in 1987. It now has over 40 staff based in North Sydney, with a team of highly educated personal advisers who provide proactive advice and ‘tough love’ to clients.
The firm serves around 700 family groups in the high net worth space, predominantly along the eastern coastline of Australia.
Stanford Brown assists clients with a broad range of financial issues. While this often begins with arranging effective insurance or the management of investment portfolios, it also extends to other aspects of their financial lives.
The firm’s expertise lies in seeing the complete picture of clients’ lives – their long-term goals, their financial situation and their evolving life circumstances – to help them confidently plan for the future.
Director of Private Wealth, Vincent O’Neill, says, “Historically, we operated like many other businesses under the record-of-advice, statement-of-advice regime for making any investment changes, and we could see the multiple flaws in that.” “It wasn’t the most efficient way to do it from a business perspective or for generating the best client outcomes, so we knew we wanted to make changes.
“We spent around twelve months, in 2016/2017, going through an RFP process to identify how to best tackle that problem.
“We went out to the market to find out the different mechanisms or tools, the different structures and the different providers available, and narrowed it down to a shortlist of four. Then we went through the RFP process, while starting to build our first managed account with Netwealth.
“We now operate a variety of different managed accounts.
“One contains a mix of active and passive investments. Another contains purely ETFs and passive index funds. We also still operate a traditional approach to managing money, which may be appropriate for certain clients and their circumstances.”
Vincent O’Neill, Stanford Brown
