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Three Scottish companies are breaking the mould in the innovative way they are supporting major players in the financial services sector
NUCLEUS FINANCIAL GROUP
Nucleus Financial Group is a new type of financial service company founded in 2006 by former insurance industry professionals and a group of high quality independent financial advisers (IFAs). At its core, the business is an
electronic platform that allows IFAs to combine or ‘wrap’ all of their clients’ investments into a single manageable online account. This means their portfolios can be viewed at a glance, giving instant valuations and allowing variations to clients’ holdings to be made.
IFA stakeholders The business is owned and controlled by its community of member-IFA firms which means they are able to take a real and active role in shaping the future development and direction of the platform, ensuring it continues to meet their and their clients’ needs. In just over four years the business has
attracted more than 80 of the UK’s leading IFA firms into its ‘community’and currently has £2.7bn of assets on the platform. The Nucleus platform provides IFAs
with six accounts: a general account for direct holdings and five others for ISAs (Individual Savings Account), pensions, protected rights pensions, an offshore and an onshore bond account. Within each account, subject to regulations, clients may invest in unit trusts, OEICS, cash,
equities (including investment trusts and exchange traded funds) and other securities such as gilts and corporate bonds.
Designed around clients The online wrap technology gives IFAs and their clients greater transparency, speed and provides a holistic view of a client’s holdings – attributes that are desirable for the future development of the fee- based IFA sector.
High growth Despite launching just before the global ‘meltdown’ in the financial markets, the company has flourished with its new technology and has just taken on 10 more employees this year, taking its numbers up to 50.
Daniel Ferguson, Nucleus CEO
As a new and growing company,
Nucleus has attracted people from a wide range of backgrounds in IT, sales and, of course, financial services, particularly those with a good grounding in products such as savings and investments, pensions and insurance. When Nucleus launched, it stated that
it wanted to reshape the financial services industry and feedback from its IFA partners proves it’s making an impact. Arthur Childs from Arch Financial Planning said: “Not only is the Nucleus wrap itself revolutionising the way we deal with our clients, but equally it offers a point of interaction with so many enthusiastic top-end IFAs.”
LEVEL E
Edinburgh-based Level E comprises several complementary businesses, starting life in 2005 as a research boutique and trading technology vendor and, in 2010, launching Level E Capital SICAV PLC, with its flagship quantitative absolute return fund, The MAYA Fund. At the heart of the whole operation is Dr Sonia Schulenburg, its polymath founder, CEO, director and controlling shareholder. An accountant and computer engineering graduate, Schulenburg began her career in investment banking, with the aim of understanding and ultimately modelling the behaviour of financial traders. The challenge was more complex than she had first thought. So Schulenburg left the bank to complete a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, after which she was finally ready to bridge the gap between the computer science lab and the trading floor, with the creation of the MAYA; an artificial intelligence- based, fully automated financial trading platform for investment management. Development of the
MAYA platform has been a process of improvement and refinement spanning several years, during which time Schulenburg’s work was supported by about £2m in private investment and competitive research grants from Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Government. A key supporter of this great ambition is Joe Philipsz, former CFO of
Dr Sonia
Schulenburg, Level E CEO
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www.talentscotland.com/financialservices
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