IN Conversation with Colin Campbell

This week I caught up with the CEO of Carnbrea & Co, Colin Campbell to have a chat about his colourful career and the outlook for Carnbrea and the Private Wealth industry in general. For those that don’t know, Campbell in 2014 took on the role as Senior Adviser at Carnbrea and followed on to […]

This week I caught up with the CEO of Carnbrea & Co, Colin Campbell to have a chat about his colourful career and the outlook for Carnbrea and the Private Wealth industry in general.

For those that don’t know, Campbell in 2014 took on the role as Senior Adviser at Carnbrea and followed on to take control of the company both as CEO and major shareholder. The role sees him building out the Carnbrea wealth business and providing investment advice across all asset classes to family offices, local and offshore high and ultra-high net worth clients and not for profit organisations.

Colin, it’s my understanding you worked for NAB Money markets, where I stared off as well. Can you shed a bit of light on your beginnings?

That’s correct. My career first started off at CIBC. Then became the National Sales Manager at NAB and later became the Head of Institutional Sales at NAB including offshore counterparties & Central Banks. At NAB, I managed significant business lines covering both institutional and retail products in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Prior to the NAB though, I worked in financial markets as a trader and desk manager. Other stints include working with McKinsey’s, I was the Global Project Director where I worked on the realignment of the NAB Wholesale Division product centric model to a customer segmented model.

I moved across to retail bank, running credit cards in 2002. Then the bank gave me a cheque in 2005 and switched across to retail broking at Wilson HTM. That began my retail broking career for eight years and then came Carnbrea.

I hold a Bachelor of Commerce, Master of Business Administration, Post Grad Diploma – Securities Institute of Australia. And I’m a former Board Director and Fellow of the Finance and Treasury Association and Senior Fellow of FINSIA.

How did your role at Carnbrea come about?

So, following on from Wilson HTM seven years ago, I moved across as a Senior Adviser to Carnbrea and Co. It was owned by The Bangarra group and then Bennelong Wealth Partners after which I took control of the Melbourne-based wealth management and advisery firm in 2013.

How did you go about growing your firm?

We started off with 4 which has grown to 16 now. We’ve grown semi-organic. Being small is great but its two-edged sword, it can be difficult to pitch against the big firms for big mandates.

What is Carnbrea’s offering?

We have two business lines: Private wealth and Asset Management. We provide our clients with both personalised Financial Planning and Investment Advise

ry advice. That includes Superannuation, SMSFs, Retirement and Estate planning, Wealth Accumulation and Risk Management & Insurance Planning services. On the investment side we have 3 types of investment strategies – the ETF Model Portfolio, Fund of Funds Model Portfolio and ESG Model Portfolio.

On the Asset Management side, we provide a customised investment solution to Financial Planning and Accounting Groups. This includes a four-step investment management process from the formulation of your investment strategy, selection and execution of investments, performance reporting and monitoring and annual strategy reviews. We also set up an Investment Committee function for you to formalise investment decision-making processes and provide oversight on your investment governance framework.

And how do you differentiate yourself?

We spend more time looking at off the run structures such as start-ups, private debt, structure debt and alternatives. I’m on the board of iPartners. They are a leading alternative asset investment platform that provides digital access to wholesale investors, where they can invest in institutional grade alternative assets for wealth creation, income generation and portfolio diversification.

How did the firm cope during Covid, did you hold your own webinars and zoom conferences?

We haven’t been so active in webinars, but we communicate with clients via zoom conferences. We digitised fairly well during Covid and managed to keep in touch with clients and reassure them during tough times. We do a Quarterly Asset allocation and a Monthly update to clients. That includes a hardwire assessment of our calls and how they’ve performed. It has to be out on the first day of the quarter. We haven’t rolled out MDA’s yet, but it is a space we are actively looking into.

What platform does Carnbrea use?

We aren’t hardwired into any such platform. We are platform agnostic and will continue to be. But we have 3 platforms. Powerwrap, BT and Macquarie. It’s never easy to move clients across from one platform to another despite what the platforms say, what’s the benefit for the client? We have to be comfortable our advisers are capable and happy with the technology they use.

We don’t do the vanilla retail planning firm type service, whereby they drop-in clients into a MDA type service, where they get one portfolio per risk rating. The advisers then only concentrate on providing advice and the firm concentrates on the investment side on a best interest’s duty. Fees are lowered. Our clients expect a high-end service for the fees they pay.

And finally who do you go for in the football?

That’s an easy one, Richmond Tigers.