Fortnum Financial Group has chosen the former head of three major banks’ licensee businesses to succeed the group’s founder and executive chairman, Ray Miles, and to lead the group into its next phase of growth.
Neil Younger, most recently managing director of ANZ’s advice and open market channels, has been appointed managing director of Fortnum Financial Group, which consists of the financial planning business Fortnum Financial Advisers and the portfolio construction business Innova.
Miles (pictured) says the group is set for a period of expansion that Younger will oversee, but says details are yet to be announced.
“There’s a whole lot of work going into that now,” he says. “More than you can imagine.”
Miles says he will take six months off, beginning in mid-January, to give Younger time and space to settle in. After that, he says, he will reassess his ongoing role.
“I want him to be able to put his feet under the desk, take control, and get on with stuff,” Miles says.
“And I don’t want him to have to bother with me getting in the road. So I’ll take six months off and come back, and really, my strengths are in recruiting and stuff, and I’d like to keep doing that. I don’t necessarily want to retire, but if retirement is the best answer, then I guess I’ll have a look at it.
“I’ll be staying on as chairman, so I’ll be coming back for board meetings and I’ll keep an eye on them.”
Younger had a stint as ANZ’s head of aligned dealer groups, is a former general manager of Commonwealth Financial Planning (CFPL), former head of dealer groups at the Westpac-owned BT Financial Group, and former head of the Westpac-owned Securitor financial planning business.
“I’ve known Neil for a number of years,” Miles says.
“We worked with him when he was at [the ANZ-owned] OnePath and they owned 20 per cent of our business. I built a pretty good relationship with him, and a lot of respect. He’s just dead straight; he just tells you how it is, and I really like that. And he’s obviously got an enormous amount of capability.”
Right guy, right time, right place
Miles says Younger’s availability for the role was “just one of those things”.
“He’s had six months off, and he came to me and we started talking. And [I realised] I’ve spent 27 years trying to find a successor, and the guy is sitting in front of me. While there were no plans for me to step aside or anything, I thought if I don’t grab this guy I’m going to spend another 27 years trying to find someone.
“He is the successor. He’s taking over the business. I’ll stay on as chairman and I’ll stay on in whatever roles that are suited to me, but in terms of the actual business itself, he’s going to be running it.
“I had to give it to someone who was straight up-and-down. Because [our advisers] are shareholders and owners of the business, you can’t lie to them. You can’t spin at them. But he’s got a really creative mind and broad experience. He’s thought a lot of stuff through. He really does get it.”
Miles says Joel Taylor will continue to run the dealer group and Dan Miles will continue to run the portfolio construction business, and “if we’re going to make this into a truly world-class business, it needs some extra arms to it”.
[Younger’s] job is to do that,” Miles says. “He will have equity in it.”
Miles says he foresees no issues with Younger’s institutional background clashing with the independent mindset of Fortnum and its advisers.
“I think you’ll find he’s had enough of corporate life,” Miles says.
“And I think you’ll find he’s in sync with us as well. Our positioning in terms of independence is a significant advantage in the marketplace at the moment, and I can’t think of a single reason why we’d ever want to change. He gets all that.”
In the sweet spot
Miles says the sector of the financial planning industry that Fortnum plays in will be an exciting place to be in coming years.
“The instos are going to get out,” he says.
“They have to get out. They don’t know what they’re doing in it and they shouldn’t have been in it in the first place. They [stuff] up the whole system because everything’s around product, instead of advice. In the end you’ll either have to have your own AFSL [Australian financial services licence] – which I think is problematic, and ASIC needs to get serious about those guys – or you’re going to be in a dealer group like Fortnum; and in our case the practices own 70 per cent of the business, so all the interest are aligned.”
Miles says Fortnum moved its platform business – which operated as Eclipse – to HUB24.
“It’s gone; we’ve moved it out,” he says.
“It was always an issue, and the technology spend and all that stuff was just going to be too hard. The reason we did it in the first place was because the prices everybody wanted for platforms was ridiculous, so we just thought we’d do it ourselves.
“And in the end it became a conflict so we moved it out.”
