These CAs(SA) manged to build an international award winning investment and advisory firm in London that services clients worldwide through hard work and diligence.
They have built their business to be client-focused, non-bureaucratic and technologically astute and describe themselves as a small, nimble team, stemming from large organisations with a financial services and technology background.
Although they are based in London, they cater to clients worldwide.
The directors of the business align their interests with clients by investing a significant portion of their own money in Omba investment strategies.
Kirsty Wilson CA(SA) is involved in building out Omba’s business in South Africa. She started her career at Deloitte in Johannesburg in the financial services department and subsequently worked in the finance department at Aerobotics, a South African based agri-tech start-up, and co-founded a boutique corporate tax advisory business specialising in assisting start-ups with their tax compliance.
‘I did an internship with Omba in 2017, when they were just starting out. There was only Andrew, Mark and David at the time,’ she remembers. She subsequently obtained her master’s degree in international tax law and joined Omba full-time in October 2021.
Andrew Limberis CA(SA), CFA, an investment manager, joined Omba full-time in September 2017. Before that, he worked as a manager at EY in London, in the banking and capital markets division. Andrew also worked in the Johannesburg and New York offices of EY where he audited asset managers, hedge funds and other financial services firms. Preceding his time at EY, Andrew was also an associate lecturer in management accounting and finance at the University of the Witwatersrand where he obtained his MCom Accountancy and was awarded the top student price.
In addition, Andrew is a CFA charterholder and scored above the 90% percentile of all global candidates for the CFA Level III exam.
Andrew decided to join Omba because he knew it was a good opportunity. ‘I was introduced to Mark Perchtold CA(SA), CFA, through a friend of mine and thought what he and the other founder, David Pierson, was speaking about – their vision for the business and how they were looking to improve the offering to a broader array of people, was very attractive to me.’
Mark Perchtold, director at Omba, spent just under 12 years at Goldman Sachs, most of which was in the investment management division in London where he gained experience in asset allocation, equities, fixed income, alternative investments and derivatives.
Preceding Goldman Sachs he was a manager at KPMG in the consumer markets audit and assurance division where he spent nearly four years. Mark qualified as a chartered accountant in South Africa and is also a CFA charterholder. He has been investing in financial markets since 1998.
While all Mark’s friends went overseas for work, Mark felt stuck in Johannesburg. He eventually got a secondment to KPMG’s Atlanta office in Georgia. ‘I was initially very disappointed, but it turned out to be an absolutely amazing experience. This is where I caught the travel bug!’
Mark packed his bags and went to London in 2004 without having secured a job first. ‘I landed on a Thursday. I got two interviews on the Monday and got a job offer 24 hours after that because there was a boom at the time for qualified chartered accountants to work in financial services and product control, in corporate accounting roles and in Sarbanes-Oxley roles.’
He started working at Goldman Sachs in an accounting role. ‘It was pretty boring,’ Mark admits.
After a few months he saw a job posted internally for a financial analyst in the UK/South Africa team to assist in drafting portfolios and dealing with clients from an investment perspective. ‘That was where the pivot in my career took place – from being an accountant to moving into investments.’
Twelve years later, Mark was chatting to David at a friend’s bachelor’s party about the issues they saw in financial services and how things could be done better from a client-facing and investment point of view, as well as from a data storage, operational and tech perspective. ‘And you know, over a few beers and a bottle of wine, a long weekend of chatting we decided to try it ourselves.’
David was previously a programme manager at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Preceding his time at EBRD he spent five years at Barclays Wealth where he was responsible for numerous IT and change related projects including integrations and migrations of software systems.
He holds a BCom degree from the University of the Witwatersrand where he majored in information systems and management accounting. He also holds a PRINCE2 practitioner certification.
Over the next six to nine months, Mark and Dave formulated a plan on how they leave their comfortable corporate jobs and take the plunge. Omba was born in 2016 and has been going from strength to strength ever since.
Being an accountant, Mark describes himself as being quite risk-averse. ‘In your training you learn how to be organised. Both of us started saving a more than a year in advance and we had a structured plan. We didn’t just resign on a whim.’
The biggest thing they had to get into place was getting regulated. ‘You cannot have any clients unless you’re regulated,’ he explains. Mark, Dave and Andrew had to demonstrate they had adequate systems, controls and processes, as well as the experience to ensure things were being done properly.
Another challenge was getting clients. ‘You had to be thoughtful about respecting the restraints that were imposed on you by your prior employer, so we couldn’t get clients in advance because that would have been a breach of our restraint of trade. The first $50 to $100 million in assets was certainly the hardest for us to gather. These days it’s far easier because we’re more than five years in, we’re regulated in four jurisdictions and we’re a much bigger team.’
Mark and Dave decided to take the conservative route and did everything above board. When Mark resigned at Goldman, he was the head of the team that looked after the South African business. ‘A lot of clients followed me in this new venture because they liked and trusted what we did for them. When people saw our profiles, they quickly realised that we were not just crazy youngsters taking a chance.’
Mark feels the biggest challenge many entrepreneurs will face is the trade of between how much equity you give away to a third-party funders versus funding yourself. ‘Fortunately, I had a good prior career, and I had some money, so I could fund a meaningful portion. The other big thing was thinking about not drawing the same type of salary I had, and I was willing to do that for a number of years.’
He discussed it with his wife, also an accountant, and the couple decided that in the worst-case scenario, he can always get a job again. ‘Which would have been terrible!’ he admits. ‘Like, you gave up a good job and then you failed! The emotional scars would have been terrible!’
These days, Omba’s primary jurisdiction is the United Kingdom. They also have a foreign FSP licence in South Africa, act as investment manager to their own UCITS funds in Ireland and have been approved to distribute in Switzerland.
Their main client base, however, remains the UK and South Africa.
Over the years, Omba has grown organically and now consist of eight team members. ‘The intention is very much to continue to expand and grow our brand globally as well as onshore South Africa and perhaps one day set up a full team on the ground in South Africa, which Kirsty would help oversee.’
They are also planning on going into other territories in the future, such as continental Europe, North America and maybe even Southeast Asia.
‘We grow organically. As we grow assets, we grow revenue, and then we could hire more people,’ explains Mark.
According to Kirsty, what makes Omba different from other advisory firms is that ‘while we are a small, nimble team, we have embraced technology as a key principle in setting up and building the business. This gives us large operational scale to rapidly integrate new custodians and clients and maintain low operational costs, which we pass on to clients in our low fee. In addition Everyone on the team has come from big firms and have tried to individually improve things they saw going wrong at the big firms, both from a client’s perspective and a technology side.’
With Dave on their team, Omba has embraced technologies and have very good systems. ‘The way that we allocate capital is also a little bit different because we’re not tied to a service provider and a specific benchmark. We look at it completely freshly and say, if you just landed on the earth today, where would you invest your money?’
‘Another distinction,’ adds Mark, ‘is that we only use exchange-traded funds to build portfolios. Exchange-traded funds are very diversified which lowers risk and provides some level of comfort to investors. And the other interesting thing is that they’re very low-cost. So, the cost to the end customer is low. We also keep our fees low and cap our total expense ratio of all our funds and have no performance fees. We also only charge 0,3% on our separately managed accounts.’
‘For the South African investor, we are truly an offshore solution,’ adds Andrew, ‘and it is a very easy, simple and streamlined process to get started.’
The name Omba comes from the ombu tree Mark was sitting under when he decided to give the business a go, and the African baobab tree. ‘These trees are so phenomenal, with massive canopies. They provide shade, but they are very tough, resilient. We liked the tree metaphor because it represented a lot about what we wanted to be. We wanted to have strong roots and foundations and good principles and values, which would result in this canopy of growth in your portfolio and assets.’
Omba has truly proved their worth in the past few years and was awarded the emerging manager award at the prestigious 2020 PAM awards, proving that all their hard work and diligence is paying off. Their goal, to be a positive change in the industry is being reached through their success, measured by the satisfaction of their clients.
Mark knows one of the reasons for their success is the CA(SA) qualification. ‘I think it is the best business education you can get, not only in South Africa, but the world. CA(SA)s are technically extremely competent. It gives you a wide, diverse understanding about how business works.’
Author
Marteli Brewis
