Atlas Wealth Management
Atlas Wealth Management, a Queensland, Australia-based advisory business which specialises in looking after Aussie expats around the world out of its Gold Coast offices, has named James Ridley to its financial planning team, as it looks to grow to handle an increase in the number of Australian expatriates who have been contacting the company for help with their finances.
Prior to joining Atlas towards the end of last year, Ridley, a native Australian, had been portfolio manager for Zenith Super, where his duties included looking after clients through various platforms which allowed separately-managed accounts, and making sure the investments they were holding met the company’s strict mandates.
At Atlas Wealth, Ridley will be responsible for looking after the firm’s clients, conducting reviews of existing clients’ portfolios and structures, and looking after all new inquiries, which, the company says, have been coming in thick and fast lately from places as far away as “Moldova, the Cayman Islands and Norway”.
Atlas Wealth founder and managing director Brett Evans said new laws that tax expat owners (among others) of unoccupied properties in key Australian markets, coupled with the new data-reporting obligations being forced on Aussie expats by the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard and US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, have been driving new business to Atlas, which claims to be the first Australian financial services firm set up solely to provide financial services and advice to Australian expatriates.
KBL European Private Bankers
KBL European Private Bankers, the Luxembourg-headquartered bank with outposts in 50 cities across Europe, has added three names to its executive committee, with three senior appointments. All three are subject to regulatory approvals.
The first is Nicholas Harvey, who will join KBL from Precision Capital in the second quarter of the year as deputy chief executive. In this role, Harvey will be in charge of group strategy as well as mergers and acquisitions, KBL said.
Precision Capital, which represents the private interests of members of the Al-Thani family of Qatar, acquired a 99.9% stake in KBL in 2012. At Precision Capital, Harvey has spent the past five years as its Luxembourg-based deputy CEO.
Separately, two individuals have been named to take over duties that until now had been handled by Yves Pitsaer, who is retiring from his role as group chief risk officer and regulatory affairs. In his place, Siegfried Marissens, secretary general of KBL, will assume additional responsibility for compliance and regulatory affairs, while Anthony Swings has been named group chief risk officer. The appointments of Marissens and Swings are effective immediately, pending receipt of the necessary approvals.
Butterfield Mortgages Ltd
Butterfield Mortgages Ltd, the London-based, HNW-specialist mortgage banking arm of Bermuda-based, Bermuda- and NYSE-listed Butterfield Bank, has named Radhika Madar to its team as a relationship manager, as it expands its business.
Madar comes to Butterfield Mortgages from Enness Mortgages, where she worked as a specialist in real estate finance after joining it in November, 2016. Before that she worked as an associate partner at St James’s Place Wealth Management (Asia), advising individuals living in Singapore. Altogether she has spent ten years working in various aspects of private-client advice, including real estate, client acquisition, and risk and compliance, Butterfield said in a statement announcing her appointment.
Madar is a graduate of the University of Kent, Canterbury, and holds qualifications from the London Institute of Banking and Singapore College of Insurance.
As reported, in January 2017 Butterfield Bank announced that, following its “orderly” wind-down of its London-based private banking business, it intended to continue to operate in the UK market as a provider of high-net-worth residential mortgages.
The Butterfield name is one of the oldest in offshore banking circles. The bank grew out of a Bermuda trading company founded by Nathaniel Butterfield in 1758; Butterfield’s son, Nathaniel T, expanded the business to include financial services, and by 1951 it had become the largest Bermudian-owned and held company in terms of per capita owners.
