Top Ten HNW Wealth managers

It was a meeting with a client, while Ross Elder was at Barclays Wealth, that helped to bring home to him the fact that the investment decisions he made personally weren’t always the same as those he was recommending to his clients. Further discussions with clients – this time while he was at Berenberg – laid the foundations for a different approach. ‘Our clients very generously said we’d done a good job, service had been good, performance was good,’ Elder recalls. With fellow Berenberg alumnae Fred Hervey and Becky Robbins, Elder developed the idea for a partner-led firm and, in 2014, established Lincoln Private Investment Office. The company, Elder says, is ‘a wealth management business built by its clients, for its clients’; the team at Lincoln invest all of their own investable wealth in the same portfolios and investments as their clients. ‘If we ever lose money for our clients,’ Elder says, ‘we lose money for ourselves and our families.’ The simple philosophy of independence and shared financial values has served Elder well, and, last November, he was crowned Spear’s HNW Asset Manager of the Year. Clients are mainly UK-based entrepreneurs and financial professionals with a minimum investment of £3 million. Elder and the team do prefer not to focus on AUM figures, but instead concentrate on delivering the core objective of service excellence and strong long-term investment performance.