DeVere chief executive Nigel Green said the company hoped to have an office "in every major financial hub in the States within five to 10 years", beginning with a total of six US offices up and running within the next 18 months.
“New York has all the potential to be the top deVere office in the world,” Green added, in a statement issued today, as he paid a visit to the deVere office, which opened in the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan in March.
“We have recruited nine advisers [for the New York office] in the last month alone, and we expect to have 25 by the end of the year,” Green said.
As reported, deVere opened an office in Miami’s financial district last year, and is in the process of opening another in Houston, America’s major oil industry city. Many international oil industry executives are said to be current deVere clients.
Green did not say where the other three offices the company is looking to open in the US by the end of 2013 would be, beyond being located in “strategic locations”.
In taking charge of deVere’s New York business ,Flambard succeeds Simon Pratt, a longtime deVere management executive who typically oversees the setting up of new offices.
Close Offshore veteran
Originally from the UK, Flambard has spent more than a decade with what is now Kleinwort Benson in Guernsey, after having started at the company when it was the international arm of Close Asset Management. As reported, Kleinwort acquired Close Offshore last year.
Prior to this, Flambard spent two years in Hong Kong in the early 1990s with an undisclosed financial services organisation, and subsequently also worked in South Africa, after having started his career in Guernsey as a chartered tax adviser with PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
At deVere, Flambard said he will seek to connect with the “more than 160,000 [British] expatriates” currently living in New York City, in addition to the significant number of Irish nationals also living there, and in the Greater New York area.
“In addition,there are [also] a substantial number of Americans citizens who have UK pensions and who have now returned to New York City,” many of whom would be potentially interested in advice about how to manage and possibly transfer them, Flambard added.
Flambard said that his experience at Close and then Kleinwort Benson in the development and distribution of qualifying regulated overseas pension schemes, and similar overseas pension products over the past six years had made him realise that there was “an enormous opportunity in the US, if there was an organisation that could successfully tap into that market”.
While working with deVere at Close and then Kleinwort, he became aware of deVere’s “high level of expertise and infrastructure” in the area, prompting him to regard the company as such an organisation, Flambard added.
Based in Zurich, with a key management and operations hub in Malta, deVere is privately-held, and claims to be the largest financial advisory firm worldwide based on the number of offices it operates.
