UK-based Investment Qvorvm – or IQ for short – may not be one of the more recognisable names in the financial community, but it has been quietly, and effectively, guarding and growing clients’ wealth since its founding 12 years ago.

Editor’s note: UK-based Investment Qvorvm – or IQ for short – may not be one of the more recognisable names in the financial community, but it has been quietly, and effectively, guarding and growing clients’ wealth since its founding 12 years ago. This publication recently caught up with the one of the firm’s creators, Lee Robertson, a former naval officer and its chief executive.

Explain when and why you founded Investment Qvorvm

I wanted to operate with a more fee-based approach to client financial planning, and my business partner at the time was less inclined to this view, so I founded Investment Qvorvm. That was October 2000 and I invited Petronella West to join me in the new venture.

Detail your own personal background in both financial services and the Navy

I joined the Royal Navy in 1981 and completed eight years of service in the communications branch, latterly in an intelligence role.

I rather fell into financial services as a result of having to step in to sort out my own first mortgage application - which was being ignored by my broker.  He’d already secured the endowment sale. Thereafter, like many in the 1980s, I spent a year with Allied Dunbar - great training and an excellent learning experience, but it wasn‘t really for me. Thereafter I worked as a financial services manager with the Halifax Group, running a team of mortgage brokers. I followed that with five years within the financial planning arm of Royal Bank of Scotland - a joint venture between RBS and the then Scottish Equitable – and five years as an owner of an IFA business, before founding Investment Qvorvm.

How would you best describe this business and what it sets out to do? What are its unique or particularly strong characteristics?

Investment Qvorvm is a boutique wealth manager. We work on the premise that detailed financial planning brings context to people’s financial and investment decisions. In our view too many investment and asset managers are more concerned with the clients' assets than they are the planning, and try to bolt planning on to justify securing the assets. This is the wrong way round. We are highly client-centric as our early adoption of the Investor in Customers client survey confirms. We were the first UK wealth manager to receive a 3 Star (or "Exceptional") award, and we have worked hard to ensure we have held this status every year since. We are extremely proud of this achievement as it is our clients who drive this award.

 What sort of services do you provide clients?

A full wealth management service based around a lifetime financial plan encompassing protection, income in retirement, and a full suite of risk-graded multi-asset class portfolios. Our tax planning services include trusts and inheritance tax planning.

Where are clients from?

We are very southeast-centric, but we have clients as far afield as Paris and Edinburgh. We have two main cadres of clients, insurance professionals from in and around the Lloyds Market, and financial and investment professionals.

Who works with you?

Petronella West is our director of private clients and has been with the firm from the outset as a co-founder. Finance may run in the family as her father was general manager of the UK operation of an Arab bank, and of her brothers, one is an investment banker and the other the finance director of an extremely well known high-end jewellery company.

What did you learn from your time in the military that is relevant to your current business?

No plan survives intact, so stay adaptable. I think this is particularly useful in financial services. There is so much ebb and flow, markets, regulatory influence, political influence, taxation changes, product withdrawals and revisions that having a natural flexibility is a great asset.

What sort of investment philosophy do you have? How do you seek to protect wealth and build it in the current environment?

We believe strongly that well diversified and constructed risk-graded portfolios built from best of breed funds will deliver for clients over the medium to long term. We believe in total return, including capital growth and dividend growth. We do not follow an "invest it all immediately" dogma and are happy to retain quite high cash positions in times of market uncertainty and turmoil.

Why should clients use a firm such as yours? What do you bring to the investment world?

Clients have a lot of firms to choose from. We strongly believe that the boutique approach is worthy of investigation as it is advice-led wealth management as opposed to the sales-led wealth management so often seen from the banks and the transaction-led wealth management so often seen from stockbrokers. Many of the larger names have had a torrid regulatory time of things, but we demonstrate our client-centric values each and every day; I feel our impressive haul of industry awards in a short eleven years underlines and evidences this claim.

How do see the wealth management industry evolving at the present time?

Fund prices are still too high and much work still needs to be done on transparency, in-specie transfers and the like - but the boutique wealth management firms seem well placed to benefit from the Retail Distribution Review. Close client relationships, proper planning executed well, with strong investment performance, adds up to a compelling proposition. Many of the larger players, particularly retail private bank operations, appear to be exiting the market or struggling to make a business case to remain now that commissions are being withdrawn.

What sort of changes in the industry would you most like to see happen, and why?

I would like to see a serious attempt at reforming the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Clients need to be protected, absolutely, but expecting good firms to keep an open cheque book to hand to pay for those who were not regulated properly, mis-sold product or were mis-categorised as intermediaries when they clearly were not - except in the narrowest legal sense - is no way to build a robust financial services sector. I would also like a properly defined cost-benefit analysis undertaken on any major piece of regulatory reform or rule as well as industry consultation on regulatory budgets and large spending plans. Finally, I would like to see a re-setting of the relationship between the regulator and the regulated. Most firms really do want to do well by their clients and strive every day to do so; if the regulator was more inclusive we could all learn and move forward together to the benefit of the investing public.

Finally, are there any other points you want to make?

I feel the financial services sector has to do more to demonstrate the value we add to the lives of the general public. We could do far more to remove complication, jargon and lack of transparency to their benefit. Perhaps every firm could resolve to make that commitment.