Introducing Richard Rowney
About our Chief Executive Officer
Richard Rowney joined as our CEO in 2020. Prior to this he held several roles at LV over 13 years, including Managing Director of LV Life and Pensions and Group CEO of LV.
Richard started his career in 1992, undertaking various senior operational, risk and change roles across Barclays Corporate and Retail Banking, and holds an honours degree in Geography from Leeds University, an MBA from Henley Management College and a GMP from Harvard Business School.
Transformational Nucleus
Q&A with Nucleus CEO, Richard Rowney
December 2024
You’re transforming the business you joined. Tell us why you embarked on this journey?
James Hay was a business with great brand heritage and a reputation for pensions expertise. It was 40 years old and growth was steady, but it’s fair to say it needed investment to move on both its proposition and the service it provided.
It wasn’t alone. It was part of a platform sector characterised by sub-scale players. This lack of scale meant they didn’t have the money or capability to invest, so innovation and service development were stifled.
I joined the business four years ago as I knew that with the right leadership, direction and investment, it had potential to break out and be a scale leader.
Not only did it have some great people with deep pensions knowledge and an excellent client book, but there was also an opportunity in the market to consolidate the sub-scale players, to grow through scale, and ultimately to lead.
I believed we could create this from the foundation of James Hay. My vision was to build the best loved retirement platform group in the UK. And we’d do it through being a scale leader, investing in our products, investing in offering great outcomes for our customers, and investing in our people.
It’s already been quite a journey and we’ve achieved a lot in a short space of time – and we’re only just getting going!
Explain the business you are today and what makes you successful?
We’ve driven our growth through a number of strategic acquisitions. By bringing together the combined strengths of James Hay, Nucleus Wrap, Curtis Banks, Talbot and Muir and most recently Third Financial, we’re now the largest independent platform group in the UK.
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Combined, we have 235,000 customers; they’ve entrusted us with administering £100bn of their investments and life savings, and with most, we support them through 5,500 financial advisory businesses of all shapes and sizes, all over the UK. It’s a very strategic group of specialist retirement brands.
Our focus on the advice sector means our priority starts and ends with delivering what advisers need to make retirement more rewarding for their customers. We empower advisers by providing the knowledge, technology and specialist products across our brands that enable them to deliver exceptional and efficient services to their customers.
And we have a breadth and depth of pensions experience and expertise that you simply can’t find under one roof anywhere else.
It’s a classic win-win-win – for the customer, the adviser and us.
What are your main areas of focus at the moment?
A big area of focus for us has been our new Nucleus platform which we’ll launch initially to James Hay customers. It’s built on FNZ’s latest technology and is going to be a game changer for advisers and their customers.
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We’ve invested in the best next generation tech and getting this launched will be a significant and exciting milestone. It gives advisers a retirement focused platform that’s easy to use so they can continue to deliver good outcomes and a great service to their clients.
Last year, we also brought Third Financial into the group. We already power some of the industry’s leading consolidators such as Verso and Radiant, with our white-labelled, enterprise platform solutions. But buying Third expands our capability in ‘adviser as a platform’, enabling us to offer larger firms with options so that they can take more control of the service and products they offer clients.
Having Third within the group has opened up some very interesting conversations with other large advisory consolidators, so watch this space!
How do you nurture a strong and collaborative culture, and how does this benefit advisers?
I’m a big believer in having a positive culture. Successful business is all about your people and therefore your culture. It’s what makes you successful in the long term.
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That’s why we place such a big emphasis on investing in attracting, developing and retaining the best people.
We now employ over 1,000 people, and we know that delivering for advisers and their customers starts and ends with them. If they feel valued, energised and motivated, they can give their best support to the advisers and customers we look after.
In our most recent internal survey, 81% of our colleagues said they would recommend Nucleus as a good place to work, which is 4% above the financial services benchmark and over 80% of colleagues said they’re proud to work for us.
These scores show we are building a positive culture and an organisation where people are proud to work.
We also recognise the importance of giving back to society and investing into our local communities. We launched the Nucleus Foundation, a registered charity with an initial £750,000, funded by shareholders and governed by a committee of trustees. Our first major investment has seen us partnering with the Verve Foundation.
We’re big fans of their work and we are now in our second year of funding their ‘We Are Change’ initiative to encourage women into the financial advice profession through education, training and mentorship.
Recent data from the FCA shows that only [16%] of regulated financial advisers in the UK are women, which needs to change. By supporting initiatives like this we want to play our part in showing what a fantastic profession it is and how rewarding it can be.
What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges for the profession?
It’s a sad fact that the advice gap in the UK is widening. Fewer people are now paying for – and therefore benefitting from – professional financial advice.
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At the same time, an ageing population and dwindling government support in retirement puts the onus on people to accept more responsibility to invest for their retirement. The need for quality financial advice is more important than ever before.
A key challenge for the industry is making sure that the benefits of financial advice are visible. Balancing short term needs against long term planning is a challenge for most, and this is where advice can really help clients in navigating these challenges.
Another area where financial advisers can have a positive impact is in helping to address the gender pensions gap. Women have on average 33% less in their pension when they come to retire than men which can result in financial vulnerability in retirement. There is a real opportunity to engage more proactively with female clients. Advisers can help by providing education and personalised advice, allowing female clients a real opportunity to achieve a more financially comfortable retirement.
What’s next for Nucleus? Are you looking to make more acquisitions?
We truly believe it’s scale that will enable platforms to be successful and ultimately deliver great customer outcomes. So a central part of our strategy has been M&A, where it provides a cost-effective way to fuel our growth and complements our existing expertise.
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If you look at our two most recent acquisitions, Curtis Banks was transformational for our business by adding scale, whereas Third was a smaller acquisition giving us a valuable specialist capability.
We have all the core ingredients to be successful. We’re well capitalised, financially secure with the full backing of committed shareholders, sustainably profitable, and have a very experienced leadership team. We have a proven track record of delivering, and a business model that enables us to bring businesses together.
There may be other acquisitions in the future, but for now our focus is on integrating the current businesses within the group, delivering our new platform, and driving great outcomes for our customers.
We’ve already delivered great results, but we’re not nearly done – there’s much more to do. I’m confident that we’re strongly positioned to set the standard for the industry, and ultimately help make retirement more rewarding.
