Wealth Manager: Christopher Boon the regeneration of Close WM

Christopher Boon, managing director of Close Asset Management’s private client division, concedes that the company has something of an image problem. Although ‘problem’ is perhaps not the right word: image confusion might be a better description.

Like any conglomerate with a broad and evolving line-up of services – in just the past 18 months Close has divested its private equity division and bought the remaining equity stake in subsidiary absolute return specialist Fortune Asset Management – the areas of the business that speak with a quieter voice can be overlooked.

Modesty should not be confused as a lack of anything to boast about of course, and Boon is proud of his achievements with the team, which in its current guise and previously as part of Rea Bank, stretches back over the best part of 20 years.

Having started with just a few million pounds under management after a period of long decline throughout the brokerage-obsessed 1980s, the business now employs 22 portfolio managers running around £1.75 billion on behalf of around 1,500 clients.

Following long years of development, Boon is most keen to emphasise how ‘lean’ the organisation is, while still offering a bespoke service: a profit margin of 0.8% of assets is worth boasting about, he says.

Born in 1962 in Barnet, North London, Boon went to Nottingham to study history at university, and says if he had any idea of a career then it was in the media.

Ultimately the media recession of the early 1980s put paid to that aspiration, and since taking a trainee role in Rea’s securities division, he says he has never looked back. Within three years, by 1987, he had been recruited to the internal dealing desk, working on behalf of the company’s private clients and the bank’s proprietary trading desk, and by 1988 was managing the dealing and stockbroking operation.

Alongside former Barings recruit Jo Wellman, Boon saw the business through the downturn of the early 1990s and set it on a more or less constant upswing in performance and assets under management over the next seven years, although the unit remained more or less pure equity, with derivative and hedge fund exposure at the periphery.

‘From the early 1980s right up to the dotcom boom, people were more or less expecting double-digit returns [on equity] as a matter of course. From the dealing side I had gained a good understanding of the nature of the market.