Martin Davis

26 November 2009 | By Lee Jones

I’ve had an indirect route into financial services,” says Openwork chief executive Martin Davis. “I certainly didn’t lie awake at night when I was a boy dreaming of running an IFA business.”

Indirect is an understatement. Davis got to the top of Openwork via jobs n IT, the media, a spell in Dubai and a decade in the army.

“I don’t know why I chose to join the British Army but I went to a recruitment office in Northern Ireland. I was raised in Ireland so I had to spend 18 months in the ranks to satisfy UK residential law and become naturalised as a Briton. It was ironic because my father was in the RAF for 20 years but I was seen as an immigrant back then.”

Davis paid his dues and was soon spotted as officer material and was sent to Sandhurst, earning his rank as captain. “I served 10 ten years, spending half of my time in special forces and did a couple of tours. But after the first Gulf War, I was coming up to 30 and I thought I could not be lucky forever, so I left.”

He moved to London and gained his business qualifications and found work at Reuters. “This was all in the media/ finance/ IT space and it was the 1990s, which was a very interesting time for all that. I caught the dotcom bug, luckily managing to avoid the millennium bug.”

That bug led Davis to a spell at a US software firm but then Misys snapped him up. “They asked me over because they had a number of IFA networks and did not know how to bring them together or what to do with them. I helped move five networks into one and that became Sesame.”

This attracted the attention of Zurich and the insurer offered Davis a job. “I thought it might be good to have a look at the other end of the distribution chain. I began running the entire Zurich emerging market business, based in Dubai. Then, because of my experience with Sesame, Zurich asked me to have a look at Openwork.”

Davis was initially Openwork chairman, but became chief executive after Keith Carby left the firm in July.

“The change did not simply come from a fallout between Keith and the company. The last 18 months have been a huge wake-up call for the whole sector as a result of both the retail distribution review and the huge economic changes. That highlighted the fact that the old Openwork strategy and leadership had to change.”

Those changes are happening fast. Over 1,000 pension and investment advisers are being called off the road by the network to undergo an intensive training programme to become more used to outcome-based regulation.

“There are certain things in the RDR that are not going to change before spring 2010 - the move towards outcome-based regulation, the differentiation between restricted advice and IFA and the creation of simplified advice, for example. We are moving our strategy forward to try and tackle the things that we know about now.”

Davis says the enforced training will help its advisers understand the “big shift” in regulation that the RDR will bring.

“The old rules were all about just getting the ball in front of the goal. The new rules want you to understand not only how to get the ball into the box and in front of the goal but to make sure you score the goal every time.”

When he became chief executive, Davis said Openwork could incorporate some sort of IFA proposition into its business. He says the firm still wants to go ahead with this but until the final details of the RDR are published structural changes cannot be cemented.

“Do we have to build an IFA proposition? Not necessarily, we think a lot of IFAs will be moving into the restricted advice area. Openwork needs to be able to attract people who are IFAs today and who will, in three years, move over to the restricted space.”

Davis says the number of people moving across the industry will depend on where the FSA sets the independent bar. “Most people will not move unless they have to but if the rules are set as high as we think they are going to be, there will be quite a big shift into restricted advice. I think that could be anything up to 50 per cent.”

To accommodate the changing nature of adviser firms, Davis hopes Openwork can change and offer some support services to directly authorised firms. “We know that a number of our advisers want to be directly authorised but want to stay with Openwork. Right now, they
He says this may mean the firm creates a DA arm to keep up with advisers making the best of the post-RDR world. “There are adviser firms that may become more complex and the owners may want to have both AR and DA firms writing different business - we would like the ability to provide a home to both of them.”

Davis is confident that Openwork can make all these changes in time for 2012 and thinks it will be a lot easier for a multi-tied network to adapt to the new world.

“We operate in a very restricted area and we think that, post-RDR, we will broaden our proposition. Most other networks operate in the full market and they will have to shrink their proposition if they want to move into the restricted space.

“It is much easier to grow what you do than restrict what you do, there is no reason why we can’t be better at this than other networks.”

Born: RAF base in Norfolk, 1962
Lives: Hampshire
Education: School in Ireland, British Army, MBA from City Business School
Career: 2009-present: chief executive, Openwork; 2004-09: chief executive, Zurich Global Life; 2002-2004: commercial director, Sesame; 2000-02: managing director and executive director, Corillian International ltd; 1991-2000: Reuters; 1980-91: British Army
Likes: All sports, especially rugby, hockey or golf, anything competitive
Dislikes: Corporate politics
Drives: A very old beaten-up Golf GTI that I love but I also have an Aston Martin DB9
Book: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Film: The Shawshank Redemption
Album: Hunky Dory by David Bowie
Career ambition: I don’t have any career ambition, I do what I enjoy and if you enjoy what you are doing then you will be good at what you do and opportunity will find you
Life ambition: Stop paying for my kids
If I wasn’t doing this I would be…Doing something competitive outside that could raise a lot of money for good causes

 

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