One need only step a few metres from the gleaming five-star Sofitel Hotel on Sukhumvit Road, one of Bangkok’s most popular tourist streets, to find unmodernised side streets crowded with shabbily picturesque shophouses; block after block of street vendors, whose tarpaulin-swathed booths appear to be occupied at any given moment by several generations of the same family; and – if one isn’t careful – to come close to being run down by a “tuk-tuk”, as the three-wheeled motorised rickshaws are known here.
The realisation that things really are just that little bit different in Thailand dawns on some newcomers in the split second that they become aware of having just been overtaken on the pavement by a full-sized motorcycle, traveling at speed.
For MBMG Group founders and principals Paul Gambles and Graham Macdonald MBE, though, Bangkok today feels positively modern compared with what it was like when they first arrived almost 20 years ago.
“It was no place for the faint-hearted,” recalls Gambles, seated in an MBMG boardroom high in one of those modern Bangkok towers.
“A taxi ride from the old Don Muang Airport into the centre of Bangkok could take several hours, and most taxis were unmetered, which meant that getting anywhere involved extensive negotiations with drivers who, more often than not, couldn’t speak English.”
Such brands now familiar in Thailand as Starbucks, Tesco, Boots and Marks & Spencer had yet to arrive, as had, for the most part, the kinds of traditional pubs English men and women have come to expect to find in foreign outposts these days, Gambles says.
Indeed, he and others suggest, one reason for the enduring popularity of Cheap Charlie’s, a quirky drinking establishment that still clings to the outside corner of a building on a soi (sidestreet) off of Sukhumvit, as it has done ever since 1982, is that it so vividly recalls that earlier era.
“It’s become iconic now, it’s in all the guidebooks,” Gambles notes. “[Because] it hasn’t really changed much, apart from Charlie having died. Some of the regulars look suspiciously like the guys who were there when Graham and I first got here, as do some of the rats that still inhabit the area."
Quiet but steady growth
Unlike Cheap Charlie’s, perhaps, but otherwise much like the rest of the country and city in which it is based, MBMG has also changed a great deal over the past 17 years, Gambles and Macdonald say. And many of the developments they’ve brought about were made, they add, in response to changes they’ve identified in the marketplace.
MBMG is, for example, is one of a growing number of expat-focussed advisory firms operating in Thailand that have been moving to obtain restrictive and hard-to-get licences from the country’s Securities & Exchange Commission. This both enables them to differentiate themselves from local rivals, while at the same time keep up with global moves in the direction of becoming ever more regulated and transparent.
The company already holds an Insurance Brokerage licence, and some of its people, including Gambles, hold Securities Investment Analyst licences. Gambles and Macdonald say they are currently considering applying for a number of other key licences that would enable them to add to the range of services they offer to their clients.
“‘One stop shop’ is a horrible phrase, but it is very popular with clients,” Macdonald says, explaining MBMG’s approach of continuously adding to its existing range of product and service offerings – and thus its range of regulatory credentials.
Among the services expats currently are able to obtain under the MBMG roof, should they need them, are estate planning as well as and legal, accounting and corporate services, on top of a more or less conventional mix of advisory and insurance-related options.
Macdonald and Gambles say their belief in offering clients plenty of choice dates back to the days when MBMG was founded – and was, in fact, one of the attractions for them in striking out on their own.
Headhunted in Blighty
The MBMG story actually began in June 1994, when Macdonald and Gambles, who had previously met only once, just prior to leaving the UK, arrived in Thailand within a week of each other. Both had been headhunted by an expat-focused advisory firm, which was in the process of setting up a Bangkok office. (They decline to name the firm, but say it is no longer operating.) Until that point, the Britons, both in their 30s, had been working in the UK – Gambles for the Bank of Scotland, Macdonald for Rentokil.
Within a few months, the managing director of the Bangkok office for which they were now working left to start his own company. “That gave the four of us the idea of doing the same thing,” Macdonald says, referring to himself, Gambles, and two other individuals who were initially involved in setting up MBMG, but who subsequently left the company shortly after. (The first initials of their last names remain as the “B” and one of the “Ms” in “MBMG”.)
Almost at once, they began to put their belief in offering their clients a full range of options into practice.
“The company that we came over to Thailand with, they let us deal with just three [life insurance] companies, which we thought was ridiculous,” Macdonald recalls.
“One of the first things we did when we went out on our own was to get agreements with absolutely everybody in the market.”
As already noted, Macdonald and Gambles didn’t really need to be reminded that they weren’t in England anymore, but their first few years in Bangkok were particularly memorable.
First came the Asian financial crisis in 1997, followed by the 2006 coup d’etat, and then the riots in 2010.
At the same time, the international financial services market was very different than it is today, as advisers “were primarily salesmen, with little or no industry experience, and private bankers, in those pre-AMLO days, still mainly flew in from Switzerland with very large, empty suitcases,” Gambles recalls.
“Without the internet, clients were at a huge information disadvantage, which worked in favour of the high-powered sales approach."
In those early days, Gambles says, he and Macdonald went to extraordinary lengths just to get their hands on a day-old copy of the weekend edition of the Financial Times, to get fund prices they could then forward, by letter, to clients.
"There was only one place in town where we could get it, and sometimes when they had a copy at all, it looked tatty and the crossword had already been filled in. But the the alternative was to wait for the monthly fund managers’ reports to arrive by post, which could take the better part of two months."
‘Holistic approach’
The latest manifestation of this belief on Macdonald and Gambles’ part in taking a holistic approach to looking after their clients is MBMG’s family office operation, launched just over a year ago.
It currently has six high-net-worth family office clients, and Gambles maintains that here especially, the one-stop shop element is not merely a matter of convenience for either the client or the company, but a question of understanding the complete picture.
“The idea here is to understand all the elements of their wealth and finances, from their accounting and legal and tax-planning to their personal financial arrangements; if they’ve got properties in a half-a-dozen other countries, we need to know how are these planned for from a tax and estate point of view, as well as how they arrange the ownership of their investment assets, what kinds of things are they invested in, what are their succession plans, how do they manage risk, and so on,” Gambles says.
“If you understand the total picture, it becomes a lot easier to tie all the elements together – whereas if you just get called in to do one or another part of it, it is much harder to do it properly.”
As Gambles and Macdonald are reminiscing about MBMG’s history and evolution, they are joined for a brief period by a Thai member of staff, Jan Sumanus, the company’s chairwoman. Later, Gambles explains how she has grown with the company since its earliest days, after having taken some time off to study and then to practice law in Bangkok. Although she keeps a low profile, these days, he says, she’s indispensable as MBMG’s “main operational and organisational force”, with a particular eye for detail and compliance issues.
“Her catch phrases are ‘that’s not enough’ and ‘I prefer cash’," he adds.
“She’s tough, but quite brilliant.”
All eyes on Singapore
Gambles and Macdonald are wary of talking too much about their latest project – a plan to submit an application for a licence that would enable them to add asset management services to their existing Singapore outpost. At the moment, it’s authorised only to carry out unregulated businesses, such as tax advisory and structuring services.
But it is clear that they are excited about expanding MBMG’s presence in what is one of the world’s most in-demand retail markets. Even if, as they admit, they are unlikely to find a Singapore equivalent to Cheap Charlie’s.
Key Facts MBMG Group |
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Founded: 1996 in Bangkok |
