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Robin Sainty

I arrived in the financial services industry by a circuitous path. Having read history at Cambridge University I worked in local government for several years before joining the Barwick Group, a large national broker in 1984. While this was an excellent grounding I became frustrated with the big company environment which made it hard to develop close personal relationships with clients. In 1990, along with a senior management colleague, Steve Barrett, I set out on the rather scary adventure of giving up a secure, well paid job and setting up a new business from scratch. The fact that we are still here over 20 years later shows that this was a good decision, although they were times in the early years when we wondered if it was!

Although we have three other companies in the group, IFA Corporate remains a vehicle for me to do what I enjoy most, which is dealing with clients who want to develop long term relationships with someone they can trust. As a Chartered Financial Planner I take my responsibilities extremely seriously. To be accorded the same level of professional status as solicitors and accountants is very important to me and reflects a great deal of hard work and studying, but book learning is useless unless it can be harnessed to the ability to communicate and win trust. Hopefully the fact that I am an executor or trustee for a number of my clients shows that I can do this.