Despite the success of this regional advice hub, advisers like Kane Leersen aren’t out to rule the world. Instead, they have an ambition to “grow by good” by serving the people that make up their local community.
Another significant recruit has joined the new venture, with ex-Mutual Trust family office adviser Angus Mann bringing a wealth of experience and a reputation for holistic client care to Viola Private Wealth.
‘Intelligence, empathy and respect’: Escala’s Amanda Fong
There are many pathways that lead to a career in financial advice, and advisers come from a patchwork of backgrounds. Although her career trajectory has moved through finance roles, Amanda Fong, investment adviser and partner at Escala Partners, says these have all been diverse experiences, and have given her a “great combination of perspectives” that underpin her – and the firm’s – advice philosophy.
“Escala’s service proposition is 100 per cent investment advice, with everything else, including legal and tax advice, outsourced, so that we can provide each client, whether it is an individual or a not-for-profit entity, a customised investment solution,” she tells The Inside Adviser. “Importantly, we work with the third party providers to ensure that everything we do is built on putting our clients’ interests first and realise their financial aspirations. It’s very personalised. The fundamental basis is technical knowledge, but strongly overlaid with emotional intelligence, empathy, and respect for the client.”
Fong says she learned the latter parts working as a waitress and as a retail sales assistant while studying for a commerce degree at Melbourne University. The path to technical knowledge came through a thorough grounding in finance.
“While I was studying I was also lucky enough to work one day a week in what was then a stockbroking firm, McCaughan Dyson, which was later bought by ANZ. When I finished commerce, they offered me a full-time job as a trainee in their equity research department, which I thought was a great opportunity to move into an area that I thought I would find both rewarding and challenging.”
She started working under the banking analyst for 18 months, before he moved to another firm, Prudential-Bache. Fong moved across with him and into equity research. She was working at blue-chip Melbourne broking firm EL & C Baillieu, which had a wealth management arm, when Deutsche Bank bought it in 1998.
“Some of us were approached to go to Deutsche Bank, where I worked in institutional equity research and later private client research,” she says. “I found I was really attracted to doing financial modelling and analysis and developing strategies for institutional investors and private investors.”
Swirling around in her head was also a stint working at KPMG in the corporate finance area. “I worked in the valuations area, which allowed me to understand company valuations and was a totally different perspective from researching companies as an analyst,” she says. All the while, Fong was heading toward advice without knowing it. “All the elements of my career so far have all used a different lens, and I think they’ve all gone into building a really effective skill-set for a wealth adviser.”
While at Deutsche Bank, the head office in Germany decided to close its Australian arm while the private client research and investment advisory team moved to Merrill Lynch and then UBS. “If I pin down when I actually moved into the advisory role for private clients, it was at UBS,” she says. When a group of advisers from the UBS wealth management business left to co-found Escala Partners in 2013, she was one of eight founding partners.
“It’s been a strange career,” she laughs. “Apart from when I went to – and subsequently left – KPMG, virtually all of my moves have been teams leaving because Australian arms of businesses have closed-down, or changed ownership; it has very rarely been something I actually planned. But the Escala decision was planned, and it has been the best move of them all.”
What Fong loves most of all about Escala is its “supportive and collaborative approach”, and the intellectual heft of the model. “All that we do is investment advice, and everything is built around that. We have a chief investment office team of six, and their role is defining the strategy, the asset allocation and underlying investments. We, as the advisers, draw on that, but our role is to know the client intimately, and to understand their requirements and their needs, and respond to those. Ultimately, advice is a mixture of art and science: the science is the knowledge base – both of the firm and of us as advisers – and the art is the relationships we have with our clients. They want professional management of their investments, that’s a given, but how that is delivered is through how we relate to and work with our clients.”
Fong works in an advice team of five. “We all have ‘our’ clients, and there is, from a pragmatic perspective, always a lead adviser, but if I’m not there for any reason, the client knows that there’s a team within Escala Partners who all know enough about the client and relationship to step in. Clients draw from that pool of knowledge and experience, but each of us are a ‘lead adviser’ and primary point of communication and touch for our clients within the team.”
Fong deals with the usual – for Escala – palette of high-net-wealth and family clients, but also likes to work with not-for-profit entities (she is lead investment adviser in the firm’s not-for-profit investment management team). This focus extends outside the office: she was a member of the University of Melbourne Investment Committee for over fifteen years, until her retirement from the role in 2024, and serves on the investment committee of two schools her children attended.
She is very positive about the future of the advice industry. “One of the main reasons why we started Escala in 2013 was because a lot of the remuneration was based on commission, and we believed there was a better way,” she says. “I do feel that the increased compliance and regulation has led to a more professional industry, with better client outcomes. While the (Hayne) Royal Commission showed that there were some really poor practices, which obviously had to go.
“Sure, the improved compliance and regulation comes at a cost to the firms that wanted to be in the industry, but because of those things, we will increasingly have an industry where graduates coming out of university say, ‘that is exactly what I want to do.’ And that is worth all the turmoil.”
