From leaders who have decades-long tenures, to new employees who are encouraged to bring their best ideas to the table, Stanford Brown is a wealth advisory firm that prides itself on having a team with skin in the game.
Vincent O’Neill started at the Sydney-based firm in 2007 in an entry-level position. Now, he’s the chief executive officer, charged with fulfilling the firm’s vision of being a market-leading professional services and advice provider in Australia. In his view, a strong culture is powering that path.
“We are continually expanding the expertise we have in-house,” he says. “We focus on developing future leaders and have seen a number of staff members go from entry-level through to equity holders in the firm."
Mira Macura shares Vincent’s dedication to culture. She is the firm’s chief operating and financial officer, and she was also its third employee, 28 years ago. Mira is responsible for ensuring the company’s vision and strategic goals are embedded in operations and across teams.
In a business that is balancing bold ambition and hands-on client service standards, Mira and her team embrace tools and technology that support productivity. From the days of fax machines to the age of artificial intelligence, security is also a perpetual focus, and one that is weaved into the firm’s operations and culture.
Embedding security from the inside out
Stanford Brown has daily interactions with its clients. As a multi-disciplinary firm, its team is trusted with managing a broad scope of payments, transactions and communications.
Clients are also regularly learning about security and data breaches, through both direct and indirect experiences in their lives. That naturally translates into concerns about the security of their own finances, which Stanford Brown holds itself and its third-party providers accountable for.
“We are very conscious that we hold a trusted relationship with our clients and of the core pillars of that will be their trust that their money is safe and secure,” Vincent says.
“We are given comfort by Macquarie’s scale and the regulations that they operate under,” he says. "It’s clear through our dealings with them over a decade plus, that security and risk management is core.”
"I think of Macquarie as an organisation that values security and takes threats seriously. That gives us comfort if we are utilising Macquarie for our clients,” he adds.
Security is embedded in the firm’s day-to-day processes, with multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled “across all platforms and technologies where possible.” says Mira.
Macquarie Authenticator is one of those authentication tools, and its rollout for adviser-initiated payments was generally well received by Stanford Brown’s clients, who understand its purpose and appreciate the extra peace of mind.
Mira acknowledges there can be frustrations in introducing MFA, but it has become her baseline expectation of larger organisations in particular. Her challenge to them is not why do you have it – it's why don’t you?
Productivity enabling progress
Mira and her team are constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve productivity. Their goals are twofold: to improve both client and employee experience.
Emma Terry, Senior Operations Associate in Mira’s team, is especially focused on finding ways to automate and improve how daily tasks are handled. It’s the more “exciting” and value-add tasks that Emma would like her team to be focused on, instead of monotonous and repetitive ones.
Embracing and adapting to new tools requires strong communication, including to assure colleagues that the new technologies are being introduced to help them focus their time on value-add tasks for clients.
Macquarie’s live chat is one of the new tools the Stanford Brown team are now regularly using. Initially, there was a period of adjustment, especially for those who are accustomed to picking up the phone to solve a problem for their clients.
Emma and her team also shared their feedback with Macquarie about early teething issues, and Emma says her team has noticed a “massive improvement” since it was first rolled out. In particular, she values that you don’t need to stop everything to make a call, and you keep a transcript of your conversations.
“You can work on other things,” Emma says. “Once again, it’s one of those technologies that is rapidly becoming a standard across the industry.”
In it for the long run
Stanford Brown is continuing to move up the complexity and sophistication curve in the advice it offers clients and sees that as core to fulfilling its goal of securing a market-leading position.
On that journey, Vincent sees Macquarie as an organisation that understands small-mid-size businesses, and the support they need to run their practices.
“I think Macquarie brings a lot of history and a deep understanding of our profession, a strong understanding of what it is to operate a small-to-mid-size business, with teams that have worked with them over many decades,” Vincent says. “And, an awareness of the solutions that need to be delivered to help those businesses get on with what they do best.”
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