Interview: Independent Women founder Lesley Mackintosh on scaling her financial advice firm across the UK

Lesley Mackintosh is the founder and boss of Edinburgh-based Independent Women, which specialises in female-focused financial advice – and is now embarking on major expansion across the UK.

The businesswoman set up the wealth-management specialist, which this month celebrates its 26th anniversary, after hearing from women that they wanted something different from the standard independent financial adviser (IFA) service.

Run by female financial experts and offering services including wealth and estate planning, tax and accountancy guidance, cashflow planning and protection, holistic investment advice and divorce support, as well as advising entrepreneurs, it believes that “nowadays, specialist advice for women is not a luxury – it’s an essential”. The company has served thousands of clients to date, and is now starting a new chapter on the back of last year being acquired by Mazars Financial Planning, part of global accountancy giant Mazars where Mackintosh is also a partner.

Consequently, Independent Women has launched a presence in six Mazars offices across the UK. Henceforth its experts include Hina Desai, a partner in the Nottingham office, and Allie Llewellyn who is based in Birmingham. Natalie Wright is a partner in the Leeds office who specialises in planning for female business-owners, while Jayne Wildish, based in London, is an expert in separation and divorce. Jennifer Massey is also based in the UK capital, with Katherine Diamond operating in Glasgow, and Umarrah Shafiq and Lindsey Docherty working alongside Mackintosh in Edinburgh.

The Independent Women founder says females 'have a significant opportunity to reshape the future through their financial decisions and the movement of wealth'. Picture: Ditte Solgaard, First Light.

The latter says she saw the tie-up with Mazars as offering a “powerful combination”, offering the chance to merge with a major global brand present in nearly 100 countries and territories, with more than 47,000 staff altogether (nearly 3,000 in the UK alone), and whose activity north of the Border includes teaming up with Scottish innovation centre Censis to bring about greater diversity in cyber security.

Mackintosh says her IFA firm was one of the first independent wealth advisory firms to focus on the needs of women, and by joining forces with the accountancy major can now continue to carve out its pioneering role in the market, and gain the scale to help many more customers “achieve their wealth ambitions”.

Explaining the ethos behind Independent Women, she states that it has since the outset taken a “slightly different” approach to financial planning, tapping into the emotional intelligence and empathy of its advisers, aiming to provide a safe space to customers who can feel vulnerable opening up about their finances and related emotions.

The organisation’s expansion comes amid a continuing shift in the landscape of women’s finance. And there is no shortage of stats highlighting the continued disparity between genders regarding, say, pay and pensions.

The organisation is operating amid continued disparity between genders regarding, say, pay and pensions. Picture: PA.

Phoenix Group, the savings and retirement specialist and owner of Standard Life, in August launched its Women’s Innovation Forum to help tackle the gender pensions gap, saying women typically lag behind men when it comes to saving for retirement – 34 per cent less on average by their 40s, and 51 per cent less by their 50s, due to life events such as the menopause, caring responsibilities, and divorce.

Furthermore, Independent Women cites data from the Financial Conduct Authority showing that even today, only 16 per cent of financial advisers are women, while Fidelity International recently shone a spotlight on how in Scotland, women in particular are continuing to shoulder additional financial stresses overall due to the cost-of-living crisis, stifling their ability to save.

And Mackintosh herself has experienced first hand the unique hurdles females face. “I've gone into many places with my husband, he's engaged in the conversation, and someone's then turned around and said to me, ‘do you work for your husband?’. You do think ‘really?’ – we're in 2023, and we still come across this.”

However, she also sees “much more female empowerment than ever before” – and cites the calculation that more than 60 per cent of the UK's wealth is expected to be controlled by women by 2025, something highlighted by Barclays Private Bank and Overseas Services. Independent Women says it sees a lot of budding entrepreneurs (it has advised business-leaders on corporate philanthropy, expansion, and deals as well as planning for an exit, for example), and has found more women thinking about buying a home much earlier in life than ever.

“What we often see now are financially savvy women coming to us because they acknowledge the complexity of wealth-management… Women have a significant opportunity to reshape the future through their financial decisions and the movement of wealth,” it says. “It is exciting for us at Independent Women to play a part in this and unlock opportunities to enable women to achieve their goals.”

Mackintosh would now like to see Independent Women (whose customer base is mainly but not exclusively female) use its expanded presence, thanks to its Mazars tie-up, as a springboard for further growth across the UK with a view to being a “really dominant national brand”.

And she stresses that her firm’s role is about growing emotional wellbeing as well as tangible wealth. “My phrase that I've always used is, ‘if you're in control of your finances, you're in control of your life’. I definitely think that if you feel that you have a sound financial plan, it gives you the security to go and do the things that you want to do in your life. We always want to make sure that [our clients are] confident that they have a secure financial plan, and we have their back. We know what they want to achieve, and we help them achieve it.”