Business Background
Delio Wealth helps financial institutions stay relevant to today’s clients by building a direct private market proposition, delivered through a white labelled digital platform. A gap in the industry was identified by Delio’s co-founders, Gareth Lewis and David Newman. Gareth is a Chartered Accountant with experience in investment banking and mergers & acquisitions. He spotted a recurring theme during practice; he realised that the entrepreneurial clientele he dealt with, were not actively engaging with wealth mangers once they had realised the liquidity in their business. As well as this, CFA Charter holder, David, who also has experience in wealth management, acknowledged the frustrations and the struggle wealth managers faced when differentiating themselves against competitors. He notably discovered that the traditional wealth management offering was becoming archaic as the private investment market sparked more of an interest to these entrepreneurial clients instead. This was now essentially where the entrepreneurial clients were allocating more of their time and portfolio.
Business Growth
The business, which started with just Gareth in the summer of 2015, has now grown to 25 employees across Cardiff, London, Manchester, Brussels and Sydney. It delivers a complete white label solution for private assets, helping a range of financial institutions and other organisations to enhance their offering through connecting private deal flow with (ultra) high net worth capital. The closely knit in-house technical team of developers, product/project managers and account managers, have supported Delio throughout its rapid growth and at present, are successfully working with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions and organisations.
Delio Wealth initially raised £110,000 from an angel investor and Start-up Bootcamp Fintech London. Due to its exceptional product market fit, the remainder of the business costs and developments were met by self- funding through the revenues Delio generated. Additionally, Delio recently closed a fundraising round of £1m circa from Development Bank Wales and a number of other reputable private investors within the financial services space.
Recently, Gareth’s proudest moment was on-boarding three, major tier-1 clients and seeing their positive feedback on the product, ‘that experience was fantastic, but the most important has been seeing the Delio team grow and scale to meet the emerging demands of the business, whilst being able to retain the culture of customer first, getting things done and having fun when doing it’.
Accelerated Growth Intervention
Gareth Lewis says ‘Delio Wealth has experienced a large range of support from the Welsh Government since inception, to help grow the business to where it is now. In particular, the Business Wales Accelerated Growth Programme was a key driver in enabling Delio to scale its offering from within Wales as opposed to elsewhere. In recent times, the Welsh Government have become strong supporters in helping the employee recruitment of Wales based employees, to retain talent and to support the Welsh economy’.
Gareth’s 5 top tips:
- Empathy and rapport – ensure these are primary considerations when establishing relationships with people. Often the first hurdle that makes or breaks your opportunity to do business.
- Back yourself. If you have an idea that you’re passionate about and you believe in it, back your idea and put your all in to it.
- Do your research. Understanding where your idea fits in the marketplace is vital. Under researched ideas often don’t stand up to scrutiny from investors so spending time evaluating the competitor landscape is really important.
- Work hard. Putting the hours in is vital in establishing a credible business plan and well thought through plans that funding can help deliver.
- Always apply the three P’s when starting up. Persistence, patience and above all, don’t panic.
Find out if the Business Wales Accelerated Growth Programme is for you.