Business Career
I resigned from the Scots Guards in 1994 and took up my first non-military job at Citbank on the Strand in September of that year. It has been an interesting 15 years.
August 2004 to the Present
The company I work for now have got sensible rules about employees' use of online sites, whereby they are comfortable with people having a responsible web presence as long as it is clear that the comments made are those of the individual and not representative of the company. I am happy to make that clear here and indeed I do not propose overtly to mention who I work for. Suffice to say that it is a very well-known international bank with a large office in The City.
I have been employed there as a private client financial adviser since August 2004. I am part of a diverse, 8 person team that generates about £6 million in revenues for the company. For better or worse, we are paid on a commission basis - this has meant that we were not party to the mega-bonuses paid during the boom years, but nor have we been so badly affected by the difficulties of the last 24 months. I have been privileged to have had the chance to help some very high calibre business people achieve financial peace of mind.
Since 2005, I have been advising clients in the niche areas of philanthropy and in socially responsible investing.
July 2000 to July 2004
Having spent over half a year unemployed, I was relieved to get back to work with Citibank Private Bank. There were a handful of key people there who I knew from my first period employed there, and with a combination of patience, multiple interviews and helpful encouragement from those people, I started my new career with optimism. I soon confirmed that the giving of financial advice and the implementing of the solutions that accompany that advice were areas that came naturally to me. I speculated that my Army career had given me the character to give the advice and the trading career had given me the knowledge about the solutions. It is too simplistic an explanation, but it is not far from the truth. I worked with more experienced colleagues to train myself and took as many of the available training courses as possible. I had a few lucky breaks as well, a couple of which saw me sent for training courses to Puerto Rico, Switzerland, the Riviera and the Italian lakes. I focussed on building a business in Ireland, which gave me the chance to revisit Belfast and to visit Dublin for the first time. It was superb fun but I realised early on that Citi was not going to be the right place for me if I was to continue my career covering UK and Ireland and also that my desire to get elected as an MP was getting in the way of my day-job. After a year of combining FX sales with private client advisory, I ageed to leave Citi in June 2004 to take a break, focus on politics and in due course start the new job with the bank that I am at presently.
The Role of Banking in the Global Economy
Bankers are about as popular as politicians at the moment. They are convenient scapegoats to blame for the credit crunch, but it is far too simplistic to land all the blame at their feet. Banks perform many socially useful functions; here are some of them.