It’s no secret that a large number of financial advisers “fall” into the profession but for Amyr Rocha Lima, it was a unique landing.
Speaking to FT Adviser as part of our Coffee Corner series, Rocha Lima, managing director at Strategic Wealth Partners, said he ended up an adviser because his friend worked at a coffee shop in the Axa head office in Bristol.
Ok, this is something I need to know more about - how did your friend working as a barista land you into financial advice?
“I fell into it, and this is for real,” he laughed. “A friend of mine worked inside the Axa head office in Bristol and he ran the coffee shop and I was sort of post-uni trying to find a career.
“I was telling my friends that I was at that phase of life trying to find what is it that I wanted to do with my life?
“My friend Leo said, Hey, why don't you hand me your CV? And I'll hand it in inside Axa.”
At first, Rocha Lima said he told his friend he’d do a coffee shop job just as a career sort of a gap thing, but he needed to find a career.
“My friend said ‘no, I don't mean the coffee shop’”, he said.
“The HR people and everybody else from Axa - they have coffees and I know them so I'll hand out your CV whenever I hear that they're looking for work.”
That’s how he landed an interview with Axa, went through the process, passed and got placed into the IFA support team, the wealth management team inside Axa.
“All I knew about Axa was it's a humongous asset manager and insurer,” he said.
“It does everything from financial services to insuring art and everything in between.
“I found my way into the wealth management team and didn't know what a pension was, I didn't really know how investments or investment markets worked and I actually didn't really even know that financial advice or financial planning was a thing.”
He added: “I just had never been exposed to that in my life before. So that's where it started and then as they say, the rest is history.”
That’s amazing. Since joining, what would you say is the biggest change in financial advice?
“My understanding of how the financial planning profession has been evolving over 20 years is reflective of my career,” he said.
“I was very product-focused, but you would expect that - I was working at a product provider, I was living in product provider land.
“But I also think that the profession and the sector as a whole financial services was very product-orientated at that time, too.
“The evolution I've seen in my career has, to a certain extent, mirrored what's happening in the industry.”
He explained that he went from working at Axa to working at MetLife, another insurer, to moving into financial advice.
“I became an adviser on the first day of RDR, more than 10 years ago now,” he said.
“I had the qualifications to do so in fact, I joined one of my clients who was hiring financial advisers to move their company into the next stage.”
