Pep Perry spent 13 years as chief executive of Escala Partners, which built portfolios for some of Australia’s wealthiest families and family offices. In that time, he learned that the client sitting across the table rarely tells their adviser everything.
There was always something missing: a beach house that had slipped a client’s mind, a stake in a private syndicate picked up through a mate, sometimes an entirely separate relationship with another adviser. Perry’s business could build a defensible, diversified portfolio around what he was told, but the complete picture, the one that mattered come tax time or when an accountant started asking questions, tended to surface later, if it surfaced at all.
“People don’t want incomplete reporting, but they don’t want to give you everything up front either,” Perry tells Professional Planner. “They might not tell you they own something, or they might just forget. It’s actually quite complicated for someone to say, oh, I forgot about my beach house. But when it comes to reporting time, they want a real one-pager telling them everything they hold, almost like doing a will.”
That gap between what a client discloses and what they actually own is part of why he built Othello, Perry says. Othello is an AI-driven, end-to-end wealth platform he set up after leaving Escala Partners, the Melbourne firm he co-founded in 2013 and led until it was sold into private equity in mid-2025, “a natural point of exit” for him.
“Once we negotiated that, I could do what I wanted and get out of there,” he says.
“That was kind of freeing after 13 years of hard work, and probably more like 25 years of experience.”
Perry registered Othello in May 2025 and it went live in November the same year.
A market advisers don’t reach
Othello isn’t built for the clients most advisers deal with, Perry says.
“It caters to the DIY ultra-high-net-worth individual: people who drive their own advice process. They need some tools, but they don’t want to pay 50 to 100 basis points for someone to build them a diversified portfolio.
“I already knew who the people were that wanted to use this: ultra, ultra [high-net-worth], $100 million-plus [people], the ‘I need a place to customise my assets; I need to execute transactions; and I need reporting on a really high level, but I have no interest in someone calling me and telling me that BHP is going up or down, I can make those decisions myself’-type of individual.”
Access to deal flow isn’t the drawcard either, Perry says. They already have the access, and “they’re big enough that people find them directly”.
“If you think about a UBS, a Crestone, or a JBWere, you’re confined to their deals. They don’t wait for their adviser to call and say ‘there’s a commercial property deal on offer, do you want in?’ They go direct to private credit managers, who line up at their door. If you’ve got that kind of money, you’re not waiting for an adviser to call you.”
Because these clients are both sophisticated – in reality as well as by legal definition – and wholesale, the advice delivered by Othello isn’t bound by the best interests duty or other retail-investor protections. But Perry says he built those constraints into the platform anyway, alongside modern portfolio theory and the Corporations Act, as boundaries for its AI to work within, to stop it going rogue.
“It’s a way to create a structure for the agentic AI agent to operate inside of,” he says.
“If you don’t build those barriers, it starts to do things you don’t want. It’s like a child. You say, stay in this city block, do whatever you want, but don’t go into the bad neighbourhood.”
Othello holds its own AFSL and gives advice, but “only in the ultra [high-net-worth] and up space”.
“We don’t touch retail. It was more, can it be built, can it function, not let’s roll this out to the mass market.”
Three modules
Othello is made up of three modules. The first, onboarding, uses agentic AI to conduct a conversational fact find.
“A guy from Microsoft introduced me to agentic technology,” Perry says. “We’ve distilled [onboarding] down to 137 points of information we want from any individual. I can’t come up with any more than 137.”
The system uses that information to auto-populate application forms for platforms such as Netwealth.
The second module is a chief investment officer function that aggregates Australian investment research, then applies its embedded constraints to build a new portfolio or sense-check an existing one, including existing unlisted holdings such as property syndicates.
The third is reporting, which incorporates any platforms used by the client into a consolidated, whole-of-wealth view.
“It logs in [to a platform] like a human does. Anything a person can do on a computer, it can do,” Perry says.
It pulls data from a client’s platforms up to four times a day into an engine tuned to Australian markets and laws.
None of the AI technology underlying the process was retrofitted, Perry says. The modules were built as one system from the outset, with AI driving the whole journey rather than sitting on top of it.
Perry says most of his DIY UHNW clients don’t use the CIO module to build a portfolio. They use it to check one, and family offices have asked him to analyse portfolios built by outside managers as an independent governance check.
Pieces of the technology
Perry says other licensees have asked to use pieces of the technology, mostly the onboarding module, to cut their own paperwork, or the CIO module as an approved product list check. He has spun that demand into a second business.
Othello is not yet the finished article. About eight people, who Perry expects to become long-term investors in the business, have each put roughly $5 million onto the platform to test it, and none has yet asked it to execute a full portfolio.
“No one is using it for what it was ultimately built for,” Perry says. “I don’t want to start executing transactions across a diversified portfolio until I’ve tested this thing a lot longer. It’s probably got a good six months of real work on it to make sure everything’s bulletproof.
“I stand by the advice. The portfolios don’t have to be perfect. Your benchmark as an adviser isn’t perfection. A diversified portfolio, rebalanced quarterly, will outperform almost every active manager, and certainly most advisers. Facing a regulator and asking is this advice justified, I don’t worry about that at all.”
As for the name, Othello is in fact named after the strategy game, not for the Shakespeare play, which Perry says appealed to his design aesthetic.
“I always like a black-and-white logo,” he says. “I was designing it, and I thought of the game Go, then I thought of Othello. I used to play it as a kid.”
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.