During November we celebrated the 30^th anniversary of the founding of Lyndhurst with a dinner for staff and partners and it got me thinking about the changes we have made to the business over the last 30 years and also how the UK economy has fared during that time.

1992 was an inauspicious time to be starting a financial services business, property prices had slumped by more 20% in the past two years after the boom in the late 80’s. Inflation had been around 10% for the previous decade and the bank rate was over 10%, plus Sterling had just left the ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) and the Bank of England was yet to gain full independence!

Against this backdrop, three brave souls set out to conquer the then murky world of financial services and during their journey, they encountered six different regulators each of whom had a different view of how to protect the consumer.

Our current regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, is introducing Consumer Duty which “sets higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services and requires firms to put their customers’ needs first” (FCA website). We would argue that for the last thirty years we have always done that, however, anything that brings the overall standard of our industry to a higher level is to be lauded.

In 1999, during the dotcom bubble, the team established its head office in Lyndhurst House and the team grew from three to eight by March 10^th 2000 when the bubble burst and NASDAQ the US tech index lost 78% of its value by October 2002! Luckily, Lyndhurst was built on bricks and mortar rather than clicks and continued to prosper opening an office in Barnet in the early years of the decade.

Then the financial crash occurred in 2008 and a period of consolidation followed. During this time our regulator was the Financial Services Authority which at the end of 2012 introduced the “Retail Distribution Review” among other things banning commissions on retail investment products. This we wholeheartedly supported as a way of modernising our industry.

Moving to the current day we have survived the global pandemic and helped our clients do the same, growing to thirty-eight in the team across offices in Harpenden and Hitchin that along with our two thousand or so clients make up the Lyndhurst family.

It was indeed a happy birthday.

Geoff Newman

Director

https://lyndhurstfm.co.uk/

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