‘My purpose is to help people seek clarity with their finances and retirement planning’
Hoxton Wealth CEO Chris Ball started his business career after attending the KPMG careers fair. ·Paul Adams
Chris Ball’s early fascination with bribery and business ethics began at the age of 11, while delivering newspapers and washing cars in Watford.
Two decades later as a CEO, Ball would scramble in the mornings to make sure the carpets were clean and the dishwasher emptied as he launched his international wealth management venture in Dubai, with multiple 12-hour flights to meet potential clients and return home to a young family the next day.
“It’s not all glamor and it was hard work in the beginning,” says Ball. “But if you don’t enjoy those parts and don’t step into ‘big success’ too early, you’ll never have a successful business going forward.”
Read more: ‘The truth is, when you’re the first CEO it’s a lonely experience’
Ball’s business, Hoxton Wealth, caters largely to expats and provides advice on financial planning, retirement and investment to a growing group of global mobile clients.
Ball’s firm, which has employed 300 staff in 20 countries since its founding in 2018, manages £2.5 billion of the investment of its 7,000 clients and its latest turnover is set to exceed £30 million.
The firm’s average client has £600,000 in assets deposited with Hoxton Wealth. However, it’s not all high net worth, with some clients investing as little as £20,000. “You don’t have to be a senior C-level executive to have an international role,” says Ball. “You may want to retire in Spain and just get the right advice.”
Hoxton Wealth founder Chris Ball (front right) now employs 300 staff worldwide.
In his youth, Ball had dreams of becoming a mechanic until his father intervened. He later set his sights on becoming a sailor in the Royal Navy but asthma foiled this dream.
In sixth grade, Ball’s eyes widened when he saw suit-clad, well-spoken employees on the opening day of his career at KPMG. “This was something I wanted to be a part of,” he recalls.
Ball enrolled in the school leaver program and stayed at the firm for seven years before moving from accounting and tax consultancy to asset management at Abu Dhabi-based deVeere Group, through a close friend’s father.
He moved in with his girlfriend and figured he’d be back home in a few weeks on cold-calling duty. He soon applied himself, despite living on an air mattress in the couple’s cramped flat. Six months later, Ball’s girlfriend discovered she was pregnant with twins.
Read more: ‘Our nut butter brand is featured on people’s dating profiles – we’re currently targeting sales of £35m’
Three years and promotions later, Ball was asked to manage deVeere’s Qatar operations. He flew from Abu Dhabi every Sunday and returned home on Thursdays. But Ball had ambitions to work for himself and be able to advise clients worldwide on cross-border financial planning.
“I could see the rest of the world moving away from upfront fees and toward building long-term relationships and working across multiple assets they own,” Ball says.
His wife, who is now pregnant with their third child, proved to be a supporting and driving role in Ball’s decision to branch out when he founded Dubai-based Hoxton Wealth with Matt Dean in 2018.
“There is a lot of talk about DIY investors, but as a busy professional it is quite difficult to find the time to do this and have the skills to execute on an investment platform,” says Ball. “There is a real need for this service.
Hoxton Wealth CEO Chris Ball says it’s important to give clients clarity.
“Most people don’t wake up and say they need a financial plan or a holistic view of their finances. Most people come to us with a specific problem, such as a foreigner whose UK pension or insurance needs to be moved from Europe to Asia.”
There are complexities in registering assets across different regulatory regimes and legal advice regarding tax planning, retirement savings, wills and different currencies. Ball says the firm’s back-office system, called Matrix, which works across organizations, helps reduce these problems.
The 38-year-old says the bigger goal than income is “to help as many people as possible find clarity in their finances.” He points to Hoxton Wealth’s free app, which now has 12,000 clients, of consumers who are ‘people-driven, tech-enabled’ and able to consolidate their global assets on a single platform (the average client age is mid-50s).
Read more: ‘This wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme; ‘It took years for Nails.INC to become a £30m business’
“The earlier we can help people before they get older, the easier it is, and not fooling them or leaving them with more questions than they came with, that element of clarity is so important,” he says.
Hoxton Wealth has acquired eight financial advisory businesses to date since 2024, seven of which are in the UK, and is targeting India in its future growth plans. The firm says its US division has also grown “aggressively” since 2020, and the need for financial planning for foreign Britons has increased.
Ball, a keen Arsenal supporter, openly admits he learned from spread betting early in his career and lives by the mantra ‘If something seems too good to be true at first, it probably is’.
The average client Hoxton Wealth deals with is in their mid-50s. ·Jacob Wackerhausen via Getty Images
At one point in 2008 he lost £10,000; On the business front, he lost $750,000 (£559,000) due to poor hiring decisions at Hoxton Wealth. “Spread bets are very speculative and not a form of long-term investment, so they probably have personal scars,” he notes, “and they shape who you become, especially when you’re young.”
The boss of Hoxton Wealth says it now makes more sense than ever to use stocks and shares ISAs.
Indeed, most of Hoxton Wealth’s advice is about investing for the long term, not about individual stocks and shares or ‘buying low and selling high’.
“If people take a long-term view and make sure they don’t dip into assets in an emergency, they generally do pretty well,” Ball adds.
How to be effective in financial planning?
When I see others start on their own and fail, they are great financial planners but are not business owners and want autonomy. This distracts them from what they are good at and they get bogged down in HR, hiring, firing and onboarding.
As a financial planning business, our clients are the most important and have a great deal of human capital among our planners. The average age of our advisors is 37, while the average age of a financial planner in the UK is 55.
Read more:
Download the Yahoo Finance app you can use. Apple And Android.
