At 10.30pm on a Tuesday, my phone rang. It was an adviser in Europe with a problem that could not wait until morning. He admitted afterwards that he had made a small bet with a colleague about whether I would actually answer. I did.
A few weeks later, an adviser in Vietnam contacted me directly about an urgent client transaction. He knew that if something needed attention, I would take it seriously and help get it dealt with. Neither call would feature in a conventional description of my job. Both get remarkably close to describing what I believe my job actually is.
After 13 years of building NEBA, I have come to understand something that I think much of the wealth management industry still gets wrong. You cannot demand loyalty from people who have the freedom to choose where they work. You have to give them a reason to choose you. In international wealth management, that distinction matters enormously.
You can own a business. You cannot own trust
People who have spent their careers in the UK market often struggle with this. In the UK, the client book is generally treated as belonging to the firm. Restrictive covenants, ownership clauses and the regulator’s view of who is responsible for the client all point the same way.
International advice is different. It is fundamentally a relationship business. The firm provides the regulatory framework, infrastructure, technology and operational support, and those are essential. But the trust that connects an Adviser to a client is built between two people, often over many years, across several countries and through some of the most important financial decisions of a life. A client in Dubai, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City or Cayman did not choose a brand. They chose a person.
That trust does not transfer because a business changes ownership, a contract expires or a different logo appears above the door. Nor does it belong to the firm simply because the firm’s systems record the assets. Clients decide whom they trust.
Of course, the movement of client relationships is subject to contractual obligations, client consent and regulatory requirements. Those protections matter. But we should not confuse the rules governing a relationship with the reasons the relationship exists. Everyone in the international industry has watched an experienced team leader move to a competitor and take the desk, the support staff and a very large book of client assets with them. It happens at the most well-known names in wealth management, and it usually happens quietly.
If anyone doubts that, it is worth remembering how NEBA was built. Experienced advisers chose to join us, often bringing long-standing client relationships from businesses they no longer believed were the right place for them. It would be extraordinary to build a business on that principle and then pretend the same freedom should not apply to our own people.
We make it easy to leave
Some businesses respond to adviser mobility by making departure as difficult as possible. I have always believed that asks the wrong question.
Every NEBA adviser has ownership of their client relationships written into their contract. Plenty of firms say that. Most, when the moment comes, discover reasons why it does not quite apply. We mean it. If an adviser decided to leave tomorrow, we would transfer their clients to the firm they named, subject to the client’s consent and the regulatory process, thank them for their time with us and wish them well. The client’s interests do not stop mattering because the adviser has changed letterhead.
That means our advisers can walk at any time. Recruiters know it, and they call constantly. Across the international market, hundreds of millions in client assets can move from one firm to another in a matter of weeks, and no contract will stop it.
If someone stays because leaving would be painful, is that loyalty? Or have you simply made the cost of leaving too high? Those are two very different things. And yet our people stay.
Not what you would expect
Commission matters. Of course it does. Our remuneration is competitive, but there will always be another firm willing to offer more to attract an established adviser and their book. Technology matters too. So do administration, investment support and operational efficiency.
But I have yet to meet an experienced adviser whose long-term commitment to a business was built on a commission percentage or a particularly impressive piece of software.
And I would not claim that NEBA gets everything right. We make mistakes. Processes occasionally fail. Sometimes an adviser hears about a problem from their client before we have identified it ourselves.
What matters is what happens next. Does somebody take responsibility? Does leadership get involved when it needs to? Does the business stand behind the adviser when a difficult situation arises? Or does everyone retreat behind a job description and explain why the problem belongs to somebody else?
People can forgive an organisation that occasionally gets something wrong. What is much harder to forgive is an organisation that disappears when something goes wrong. That is where loyalty is either strengthened or lost. Not at the annual conference, not in the recruitment presentation, and certainly not in a carefully worded statement of company values. It happens in the ordinary, sometimes uncomfortable moments when people discover whether the promises they were given actually mean anything.
Alongside, not above
I have never believed that my position makes me too senior to help solve a problem. Quite the opposite.
If an adviser is struggling with a client case, I want to understand why. If a process is failing, I want us to fix it. If someone needs support during a difficult period, I want them to know they are not facing it alone. That does not mean bypassing proper controls or personally making every decision. It means taking responsibility for making sure problems are addressed, quickly, by the people equipped and authorised to resolve them.
And that commitment cannot be reserved for the advisers who generate revenue. It applies just as much to compliance, administration, operations, finance and everyone whose work makes the client experience possible. Everyone in the division knows what my diary looks like, and they also know that if they need time to talk through a problem, they will get it. You cannot ask people to give the business everything they have and then be unavailable when they need something back.
One of our advisers once spoke publicly about how much the support he received during his difficult first months at NEBA had meant to him. I valued that more than any production league table, because it told me something important about the organisation we were building. He did not remember a commission structure or a recruitment promise. He remembered that when things became difficult, someone stood beside him.
A council, not a command chain
The same philosophy shapes how we run the business. The divisional leadership meetings in our international division are called ‘council meetings’, and the name is deliberate.
Compliance, operations, finance, HR and our regional leaders come together not simply to report on their own departments, but to challenge how the whole business operates. Our finance lead can question a commercial decision. Operations can challenge the way we manage people. A regional leader can raise concerns about a process developed elsewhere. Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.
That does not remove individual accountability or compromise the independence of compliance. Clear responsibilities and professional standards remain essential. But authority should never be confused with infallibility.
I learned the principle behind this from leaders of the past. A religious leader was once asked how he got such a large and varied following to do what was asked of them. His answer was that he taught them correct principles and let them govern themselves. That is the model we run. We agree the principles, we are clear about the standards, and then we trust capable people to exercise their own judgement. When someone falls short, we deal with it directly.
What we do not do is mistake constant instruction for leadership. A business where every answer must come from the top will eventually stop producing people capable of finding answers for themselves. And a business that does not trust its people should not be surprised when those people stop trusting the business.
A record I do not take for granted
Since NEBA became part of TEAM, two advisers have left us. One had signed with another firm before we had even walked into the room to introduce ourselves. The other was supposed to be selling his book to another firm – but that has sadly fallen apart. Both are now in conversation with us about coming back. In an international market where experienced advisers have genuine alternatives, that is a record of which I am extremely proud.
But I would never mistake it for something we are entitled to. Retention is not a trophy a business wins once and then keeps. It is the consequence of hundreds of decisions, conversations and commitments, most of which never appear in a management report.
Every time we do what we said we would do, we strengthen it. Every time we fail to keep a promise, dismiss a legitimate concern or put internal politics ahead of the people serving our clients, we put it at risk. Loyalty of this kind is lent, not owned. It lasts exactly as long as leadership keeps earning it.
People do not follow leaders who tell them what to do. They follow leaders who bleed with them and for them. That is true in Dubai, Singapore, South Africa, and it will be true for as long as the most valuable asset in this business walks out of the office every evening on two legs.
So perhaps this is the question more leaders in our industry should be asking. Not how do we stop our best people from leaving, but what have we built that makes them want to stay?
If your best advisers had the freedom to choose again tomorrow, would they still choose you? And what have you done today to make sure the answer is yes?
John Beverley is executive director at TEAM
