Comprehensive kid whose fund supermarket will net him £189m
ANDY BELL gazes across the Manchester skyline at the tiny ‘broom cupboard’ where he started his DIY investment platform and wonders if he has done things the hard way. It took the Liverpool-born entrepreneur 23 years to grow AJ Bell from one of Britain’s original financial technology (fintech) start-ups into a £675 million investment giant ready to float on the London Stock Exchange this week.
That journey seems to happen much faster for the heavily hyped fintech start-ups of today.
Bell, 52, says he met a fintech company founder the day before we meet on a grey and drizzly November afternoon at AJ Bell’s state-of-the-art offices. The chap told Bell that after two funding rounds (and no profits), they valued themselves as a billion dollar company and wouldn’t sell up for less than £500 million.
Unsurprisingly, this baffled Bell. ‘This company has been going for a couple of years, written a couple of apps, and there’s silly old me who’s set up 23 years ago,’ says Bell. He’s half-joking, of course, but has a serious point to make. ‘It feels a bit like the dotcom bubble all over again. You’ve got a shiny app, a few customers and a bit of an idea. I’m sorry but that does not make you a billion pound company ,’ he explains.
And he reserves particularly strong criticism for those start-ups trying to gatecrash AJ Bell’s business by pitching investing to millennials: ‘There’s a lot that lacks any substance if I’m honest. It’s glossy apps and web pages.’
But Bell says he doesn’t fear upstart rivals as he pitches his own business to City investors ahead of this week’s float, a defining moment in his career. A modest man, Bell plays down the significance of the stock market move which will value his stake at up to £189 million.
His main job now is to make sure his four kids, aged 14 to 24, don’t start eyeing up his fortune, he jokes. ‘My only motivation to spend it is so they don’t get it. They’ve got to go out in the world and do their thing. They don’t want to be remembered for being Andy’s kids, they want to be remembered for being who they are.’
His two boys are studying for their A-levels and are ‘quite hard to get going’. ‘They just need a firework up their backside, the two of them,’ he says with a smile.
Comparing their educations to his own, he says: ‘I didn’t know how I was going to get there, but I knew working my b******s off was something that I was going to have to do. I don’t know whether they’ve quite made that same link.’
Success for Bell, the archetypal rough-around-the-edges, straighttalking entrepreneur, means hard graft – and he reeks of it. He had a modest upbringing in Liverpool, including caravan holidays with his mum and dad who couldn’t afford to pay for him to go on school holidays.
He went to a ‘good’ comprehensive school, where he learned he had a passion for maths. ‘I was a bit of a dope at most subjects but I just got maths and the logic of it,’ he says. He went on to study maths at Nottingham University and then got a job as a trainee actuary at Royal Insurance.
After a few years training, he decided he wasn’t quite ready to settle down so chose to be a football and tennis coach in America in the summers, while fitting in travelling around it.
He returned to be an actuary in the UK but took the leap to start AJ Bell with friend Nicholas Littlefair in 1995 just as the internet was taking off. They spent six years in a 149 sq ft office before the business, which started out offering selfinvested personal pensions (Sipps), outgrew the tiny space.
They bought a stockbroking firm and then in 2007 sold shares to Invesco (then under Neil Woodford’s watch) when Littlefair wanted to cash in and head off into the sunset. On his own, Bell grew the company into a fund shop with 750 staff that now oversees £46 billion in assets for nearly 200,000 customers, helping them manage their own stock portfolios.
Michael Spencer, the City grandee and former Tory party treasurer, is to snap up a 5 per cent stake this week, underlining his own faith in Bell, despite a rocky time for the stock markets and new listings in particular ( as shown by recent debuts Aston Martin and Funding Circle, shares in which have both plunged).
Away from his main focus, Bell always likes to have at least one project on the go.
Buying and renovating old properties with wife Tracey is one of them. They renovated an impressive Grade II-listed country house in West Lancashire before moving in and building a stables and a small racecourse to train their ten horses on. Bell says the horses are his ‘mental release’.
The couple’s latest project is a restaurant near their home. The luxurious Moor Hall already has two Michelin stars, just a year after opening. An eight- course meal will set diners back a cool £105. ‘I couldn’t get in on Saturday, I had to go for a curry with my kids,’ he says.
I ask him about his ski chalet in the French Alps, run by his friend, and he sounds alarmed: ‘ You’re going to make it sound like I don’t work!’
He says he has no plans to splash out on anything grand to celebrate the float, but a nice meal out with the family at his restaurant might do the trick – although by the sounds of it he’ll have to book in advance.
A shiny app, a few customers, a bit of an idea. That’s not a billion pound firm