Hoxton Wealth CEO Chris Ball got his start in the business after attending a KPMG careers fair. ·Paul Adams
Chris Ball’s early penchant for graft and work ethic began at the age of 11 in Watford, doing newspaper delivery rounds and washing cars.
Twenty years later, as CEO, Ball struggled to make sure the carpets were clean and the dishwasher was emptied in the morning when he set up his international wealth management company in Dubai, along with numerous 12-hour flights to meet potential clients and returned the next day to a young family.
“It’s not all glamor and it was hard work at first,” says Ball. “But if you can’t enjoy those parts, and you can’t enjoy them too soon, you’ll never have a successful business.”
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Ball’s business, Hoxton Wealth, caters heavily to expats and advises the growing group of globally mobile clientele on financial planning, pensions and investments.
Employing 300 people in 20 countries since launching in 2018, Ball manages £2.5bn of investments from its 7,000 clients, with the firm’s latest turnover to exceed £30m.
The firm’s average client has just £600,000 of assets invested in Hoxton Wealth. It’s not a high net worth though, with some clients investing as little as £20,000. “You don’t have to be a high-level C-level executive to have an international posting,” says Ball. “You might want to retire to Spain and just want to be able to get the right advice.”
Hoxton Wealth founder Chris Ball, right, now employs 300 people worldwide.
Ball had early aspirations to become a mechanic as a teenager until his father intervened. He then set his sights on becoming a Royal Navy sailor, but asthma put paid to that dream.
In sixth grade, Ball was wide-eyed when he saw suits and well-spoken employees during a career open day at KPMG. “It was something I wanted to be a part of,” he recalls.
Ball enrolled in his graduate school program and stayed with the firm for seven years before making the jump from accounting and tax advisory to wealth management at deVeere Group in Abu Dhabi through a close friend’s father.
He moved in with his girlfriend and, tasked with cold calling, thought he’d be going home in a few weeks. He soon applied, despite the couple living on an air bed in their cramped apartment. After six months, Ball’s girlfriend discovered she was pregnant with twins.
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Three years and promotions later, Ball was asked to lead deVeere’s operations in Qatar. He would fly from Abu Dhabi every Sunday and return home on Thursday. However, Ball had the ambition to work for himself and be able to advise clients globally on cross-border financial planning.
“We saw the rest of the world move from upfront fees to generating long-term relationships and working on more assets that they had,” says Ball.
His wife, now pregnant with their third child, proved a supportive and motivating asset in Ball’s decision to branch out, as she co-founded Dubai-based Hoxton Wealth in 2018 with Matt Dean.
“There’s a lot of talk of DIY investors, but it’s quite difficult to get the time to do that as a busy professional and have the ability to execute on an investment platform,” says Ball. “There is a real need for this service.
Hoxton Wealth CEO Chris Ball says providing clarity to clients is key.
“Most people don’t wake up and say they need a financial plan or a holistic view of their finances. Most people come to us with a specific problem, such as a pension left in the UK or an expat whose insurance needs to move from Europe to Asia.”
There are complexities where assets are registered under different regulatory regimes and deal with tax planning, saving for retirement, legal advice on wills and different currencies. The company’s back office system, called Matrix, which operates across entities, has helped mitigate these issues, Ball says.
The 38-year-old says the larger purpose than revenue comes from “helping as many people as possible seek clarity with their finances.” He points to Hoxton Wealth’s free app, which currently has 12,000 clients, which is “people-driven, technology-enabled” and consumers (average client age is mid-50s) able to consolidate their global assets into one platform.
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“The sooner we can help them before they get older, the easier it is and we’re not misleading them or leaving them with more questions than they’ve got, that clarity is so important,” he says.
Hoxton Wealth has so far acquired eight financial advisory firms since 2024, including seven in the UK and is eyeing India in its future growth plans. The firm says that since 2020, its US division has also grown “aggressively”, where the need for financial planning is growing with expat Brits.
Ball, a keen Arsenal fan, readily admits he learned from spread betting early in his career and lives by the mantra “If something is too good to be true at first, it probably is”.
The average client Hoxton Wealth deals with is in their mid-50s. ·Jacob Wackerhausen via Getty Images
He lost £10,000 in one period in 2008, while on the business front he also lost $750,000 (£559,000) in bad hiring decisions at Hoxton Wealth. “Spread betting is very speculative and not a long-term form of investment, so there are probably personal scars,” he notes, “and especially when you’re younger, they shape who you become.”
The head of Hoxton Wealth says it now makes more sense than ever to use a stocks and shares ISA.
Indeed, most of what Hoxton Wealth advises is not individual stocks and shares or “buy low, sell high” but about long-term investing.
“If people take a longer-term view and make sure they don’t draw on assets in an emergency, they’ll generally do quite well,” adds Ball.
How to be effective in financial planning
Where I’ve seen others self-start and fail, they’re great financial planners, but they’re not business owners and want autonomy. This is a distraction from what they are good at and they get caught up in HR, hiring, firing and recruiting.
As a financial planning business, our clients are most important and they have tremendous human capital with our planners. The average age of our advisers is 37, compared to the average age of a financial planner in the UK, which is 55.
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