Samantha Secomb is a Chartered Financial Planner and the founder of Women’s Wealth, an innovative unbiased financial advice and coaching service that specialises in empowering women to create great financial futures for themselves. Samantha is an award-winning adviser on a mission to make financial advice more accessible and relevant to women.
She is influential in driving forward positive change in the financial services industry, especially from the point of view of women, both as colleagues and clients.
Samantha was recommended as an IFW Showcase by Jessica Best, our January 2023 IFW Showcase, who says: “Samantha’s passions and mission thoroughly resonate with my beliefs and we had a really interesting discussion recently on IFW about financial planning for women that would be great to hear more about.”
How did you come to work in finance?
I had a few roles along the way, including Broker Consultant with L&G based in Abbey Gardens, Redhill and a stint with Towery Law when they were based in Windsor. I owe my passion for Financial Planning to Len Clarke who was the Managing Director of an IFA practice in Maidstone called Tufton’s. This firm was owned by the accountancy practice Spain Brothers and discovered what professional financial planning as a service for fees looked like in comparison to the booming sales industry I had originally met in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
How did this lead to you establishing Women’s Wealth?
I started to understand the powerful influence money has on people’s lives. It literally has the power to enable or deprive people of prospects, education, health, culture, communities and consequently impacts on our very being. Obviously, it isn’t the only thing that matters and many people have money and little else, while others have no material wealth while enjoying fulfilling lives and contributing greatly to the world, but it is a very useful tool and people get much benefit from learning how to use it well.
I am lucky my son Oliver Secomb aspired to be an IFA from school age- he is now a Chartered Fellow of the PFS and is running our established financial planning business leaving me free to launched my new venture. In 2019 I began a mission to democratise unbiased financial advice for women, both as investors and as planners , by launch in Women’s Wealth which is a completely virtual, subscription based IFA practice focussed on the needs of women.
What are your hopes for Women’s Wealth?
I would like to build a business that women trust and where planners want to work.
I did some primary research as part of my MBA that was published by the CII back in May 2021 and I learned that women prefer to work on being a better version of themselves than competing to be better than their colleagues.
Women’s Wealth is a platform where planners can meet women in the accumulation stage of their wealth journey and offer straight forward unbiased coaching and financial planning. It is for those who want to do the right thing by clients and enjoy a flexible collaborative work environment where they are nurtured and encouraged to meet their potential as business owners and professionally qualified and licenced advisers in their own right. The research I mentioned earlier highlights that women are getting stuck in a support role rather than becoming advisers in their own right. I wanted to provide an opportunity for those who want to become advisers .
Women are disadvantaged on the personal finance front compared to men and there is much evidence of this but very little specialist advice for women to help them level up in this area. Women’s Wealth wants to empower women to create their own fabulous financial futures.
Our clients want a Best Financial Friend. They want to collaborate in the design of their financial plan and level up knowledge. We deliberately set our stall out attract women who want to work with us, co create, rather than abdicate and treat us like a virtual assistant.
My hope is that planners who are early in their careers get to meet clients early in their financial journey and they rise up together. This is only possible by divorcing the AUM and percentage-based charging methods and replacing it with subscriptions and fixed fees.
I am dedicating a decade to building Women’s Wealth to be the UK’s number one financial adviser dedicated to advising women.
What prompted you to join the Institute for Financial Wellbeing?
I am Wise Monkey Certified Coach Practitioner and have learnt that creating financial solutions is not enough. The way we think, feel and behave around finances is much more instrumental in how our financial future will turn out than is asset allocating, tax planning or cashflow modelling,
It takes intention, time and investment to develop skills and awareness sufficient to help clients in these emotional, behavioural and physiological areas. It doesn’t come from the Financial Planning syllabus and so I have aligned myself to IFW where this is the constant focus of research, learning and development.
What’s the biggest thing you’ve learnt about financial wellbeing since joining?
It is a state of being and doesn’t compute on a spreadsheet.
How has the way you work with clients changed since you joined?
Co-creation is the centre of process now. Advice without client buy in is frustrating for planners and an expensive waste of time and a missed opportunity for clients.
Who or what is your favourite wellbeing guru, podcast or book?
Brené Brown – shame is at the heart of so much disfunction and her work on understanding this and how to help people out from under the weight of it is powerfully enabling.
What are you doing to advance your own financial wellbeing?
I practice gratitude daily and intentionally – then I have a trip to IKEA and slip right back in discontentment and desire for more!
Is there an IFW member you’d like to learn more about or see celebrated as an IFW Showcase? Let us know by emailing members@ifw.org.uk
