Now 47, and founder and managing director of the South America-based Swim Worldwide Investment Management (Swim) advisory firm, Scott says he feels no need to hide his petrolhead past.
On the contrary, he argues that running two companies and selling high-performance cars to successful, high net worth individuals "with high expectations" for 15 years was an ideal preparation for running a multiple-office business that caters for an almost identical client base.
That is, of course, apart from the fact that his clients now happen to live in Latin America rather than the Home Counties, and many are expatriates rather than locals.
Learning curve
“Naturally there was a steep learning curve at the beginning, when I had to get up to speed about financial services,” Scott admits. But he says he quickly discovered that he was able to draw on his engineering background, as well as the years spent running two businesses – “which involved accounting, auditing, financials, sales and marketing, people management, everything you can imagine”.
Now, rather than talking to clients about their cars’ engines and performance, he finds himself “discussing finances, and the importance of planning for the medium- to long-term future, and the crucial need to diversify portfolios in terms of currency, geography, asset classes, markets and so on,” Scott says.
“But there are many similarities – at Swim, we are still promoting dreams, and helping people to achieve them, only the vision and the vehicle is different. Instead of shiny toys that we can have today, we are ensuring people achieve their dreams and goals tomorrow. We take the approach that ‘people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan’.”
As is also the case with luxury cars, Scott says, the technology involved in financial services is always changing, as are the financial products being sold, and ideas about what is best for clients.
“At the end of the day, as was the case with the cars, it is our job at Swim to stay on top of all the changes, while making sure our clients gets the best advice and the best products available.”
13 years on
Some 13 years have now passed since Scott was head-hunted by an executive of a company that eventually became the deVere Group, and stepped off a plane into the sunshine of São Paulo to begin his new life as a trainee adviser.
He arrived with no knowledge of the local language (Portuguese), the city, or the country, but, Scott says, he took to the profession, the country and the life of an expatriate at once, and has never looked back.
Used to running the show, he launched his own São Paulo-based company – Swim – within three years of arriving. He immediately began building a team of advisers to join what he already had begun to envision as an internationally-focused, cross-border business.
Thus it was that 21 Jan of this year found him seated at a 10-year Swim anniversary dinner at the Paris Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, accompanied by some 30-plus Swim personnel and corporate partners.
“Ten years is an important milestone for us,” he says. “So we celebrated for a couple of days. And then we got back to work.”
Expansion
These days, Scott’s work increasingly involves interviewing applicants for the numerous jobs he is looking to fill in markets or offices Swim is in the process of opening, or considering opening, throughout Latin America.
Since January, these have included bases in Miami and Santiago – the company’s first in both the US and Chile – with an outpost in Lima, Peru, expected to open its doors before the end of May.
Among the markets Scott says he’s eyeing are Mexico, Venezuela – now in the first few weeks of the post-Hugo Chávez era – and certain key cities in Chile, besides Santiago.
Swim’s core business is focused strongly on South America, with the company’s London and Lugano offices existing only to look after clients who relocated from the region to Europe.
“As a company, we don’t feel that we need to be spending a lot of effort, time and money to go global, when there is so much we can do in this particular region,” Scott explains.
“I would rather we be a reasonable-sized fish in a reasonable-sized pond, than just another minnow in the global ocean.”
The Miami office, he stresses, is not aimed at attracting Americans as clients, at least not initially. Instead, it is being opened to serve as a hub for the business, for which purpose Scott says it is ideally suited.
It will also enable the firm to cater for the growing number of its South American clients who have been buying property there, both as an investment and as a second home, according to Scott.
“Everyplace is a direct flight from Miami, and it’s also a major business and offshore financial centre. Many of our business partners, such as the life companies and banks, have offices there, or transition work through it.”
It is Latin America that Scott sees as the ultimate prize. This “huge continent” represents “incredible opportunity”, he explains, as its largely emerging and frontier market constituent countries climb the development ladder, fuelled by a combination of commodities industries, such as oil and mining, and, increasingly, domestic consumption of goods and services.
However, for a business like Swim, surviving – let alone expanding – is not always straightforward, as the regulatory landscape is often a significant challenge, according to Scott.
“We have to be extraordinarily sensitive to the individual regulations and rules of each of the countries that we are working in,” he explains.
“Regulations can change without notice, on an almost week-by-week basis… and are often designed to promote domestic industry by discouraging investment outside of the country, or investment in foreign products.”
CVM scrutiny
Scott speaks with some experience on the subject of South America’s regulators, having had a run-in with Brazil’s securities regulator, the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM) in 2011. Although Swim was ultimately cleared of the CVM’s claim that it had exercised “activities in the securities market of Brazil” in spite of not being licenced to do so, the company had to pay a fine of R$60,000 ($31,000, £21,000), for what Scott, at the time, said was for “the pleasure of being investigated”.
Following the incident, Swim moved its head office to Montevideo, in Uruguay, from São Paulo, although it maintains a presence in a number of cities in Brazil, including São Paulo, to look after existing clients.
“Uruguay is used to offshore financial services, offshore banking, so it made more sense for us to be there,” Scott says, adding that Montevideo is also less expensive than many other key South American cities – which is why so many other financial services companies are also using it as their South American launchpad.
Driving the dream
Scott says he has no regrets about trading in the UK car dealership forecourt for life as an expatriate independent financial adviser, with a business that operates in several of the world’s most dynamic and interesting cities. Never¬theless, he admits that his love for “anything with an engine” remains.
“Cars, bikes, boats, planes – I even have a pilot’s licence.
“One of the problems about being based in Latin America is that you can’t own these toys for security reasons and costs – the import taxes are mad here.”
When in Brazil, where he lives most of the time, Scott says he drives relatively “boring” cars – currently, this means a Land Rover Freelander.
But one day, he says, he would like to be able to own a MacLaren F1.
“Like the one Rowan Atkinson drives.”
