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. He’s also a director of the Platforms Association, the trade body representing the £1tr platforms industry.
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
June 2026
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 improve both its proposition and the service it provided.
It wasn’t alone. It was part of a 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 five 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 there’s still lots more to do.
Explain the business you are today and what makes you successful?
We’ve driven our growth through key strategic acquisitions thoughtfully bringing together a very complementary group of specialist brands.
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By harnessing the combined strengths of James Hay, Nucleus Wrap, Sufolk Life, Curtis Banks, Dunstan Thomas, Talbot and Muir and Third Financial, we’re now one of the UKs leading independent groups for investment platforms, retirement products and wealthtech solutions
We have over 250,000 customers; they’ve entrusted us with administering £110bn of their investments and life savings, and with most, we support them by working in partnership with around 5,000 financial advisory businesses of all shapes and sizes, across the UK.
Our focus on the advice sector means our priority starts and ends with delivering what advisers, wealth managers and financial institutions need to help make their clients’ retirement more rewarding.
We empower them by providing the knowledge, technology and specialist products across our brands that enable them to deliver an exceptional and efficient service.
And we have a breadth and depth of pensions and investment software experience and expertise that you simply can’t find under one roof anywhere else.
What are your main areas of focus at the moment?
A big area of focus has been our new Nucleus platform. It’s the first adviser platform to be built on the latest technology from FNZ and was soft launched to a number of our key advisory firms in summer 2025, before going live in February 2026.
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James Hay advisers are the first to experience this next generation retirement platform, and our plan is to consolidate all our retail brands onto it over the next couple of years. This will become the strategic platform powering the growth of our retail proposition.
As well as being one of the leaders for retail products and platforms, we created an Enterprise Solutions team, combining the wealthtech expertise of Third Financial and Dunstan Thomas with the backing of the Group’s operational and financial strength.
Our solutions enable advisory firms and consolidators, investment managers and institutions to take greater control of their platform propositions. As well as being able to fully customise a firm’s investment platform, we can help power their pension proposition and also provide the elements of customer administration and service provision they need.
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 1,200 people, and we know that delivering for our users and their customers starts and ends with them. In our most recent internal survey, 78% of our colleagues said they would recommend Nucleus as a good place to work, which is above the financial services benchmark. These scores show we’re 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. In 2002 we launched the Nucleus Foundation, a registered charity with an initial £750,000, funded by shareholders and governed by a committee of trustees.
One of the key partnerships we support is the Verve Foundation. We’re big fans of their work as they share our goal of tackling the gender imbalance within financial services by attracting more women into the profession.
Our foundation has committed £100,000 to the Verve’s all-female ‘We Are Change’ programme. This has so far supported over 40 women in taking the first steps to becoming financial advisers, ultimately helping to improve access to qualified female financial advisers and increase their representation in the profession.
What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges for the profession?
We know 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 the shift from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution saving, an ageing population and dwindling government support in retirement puts the onus on individuals to accept more responsibility to invest for their retirement. Currently too many working-age people are projected to reach later life without sufficient private pension savings. This is only set to grow if not addressed, leaving many facing a cliff-edge when they retire.
Our own research has consistently shown a clear relationship between financial planning, access to advice and confidence in retirement outcomes. People who engage with planning and seek professional support are typically more confident about their financial futures and better prepared for later life.
It’s clear that the need for quality financial advice is more important than ever before. And a key challenge for our industry is making sure that the benefits of financial advice are visible.
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 later life.
There’s a significant opportunity to engage more proactively with female clients. It’s not about reinventing the wheel, but about recognising the value of personalised, trust-based advice tailored to the unique needs of women. This will make the process of engaging female clients easier and will help more women achieve a 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. Therefore 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 Financial 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 also 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 harnessing the expertise and resources of our enlarged Group into the delivery of improved support and solutions for our partners, and better outcomes for their clients.
