Steve Harvey [pictured], managing director of Westerby Trustee Services, recently appeared on The Leaders in Pensions podcast series, where he lifted the lid on how he went from a financial advisor to heading up Westerby, which today functions as a specialist provider of trusteeship and administration services for Small Self-Administered Schemes [SSAS] and Self Invested Personal Pensions [SIPP].
Harvey also covers important issues that the Leaders Council has often highlighted in its own podcast series featuring numerous business leaders, including how to handle stress and mental health in the workplace, the challenges of flexible working, and Westerby’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.
To date, Harvey has a sterling reputation in the industry as not only a reliable SIPP/SSAS provider, but also something of a legend within the sector. He was instrumental in launching one of the first SIPPs in 1990 and has enjoyed a remarkable career in the sector to date.
The Leaders in Pensions podcast features the voices of some of the most talented and experienced leaders within the pensions industry, who open up about their business and personal lives.
Most notably in this instance, Harvey goes into some detail about the importance of leadership and having good and positive people around him, including strong mentors in the early stages of his career. Some well-known names in the SIPP world were key to Harvey’s development as he blossomed into the business leader he is today, including SIPP stalwart Geoffrey Pointon who sadly passed away in April 2020 with Covid-19.
Harvey says: “I worked with Geoffrey Pointon up until about 1999 and Pointon York [SIPP Solutions] was like a mini conglomerate in the 1980s. By 1999 they went back to their core offering of SIPP and banking and then we decided to part ways after 18 years, but he was the biggest influence on my career by a mile and many other businesses were spawned out of Pointon York.
“His [Pointon’s] number two [when I was there] was Wally Huggins, the deputy chairman. To give you more of an idea of the influences on my life, he was a Lancaster Bomber pilot who trained in 1938 and trained with 40 people then. By 1941 out of those that trained up it was him and two other guys left standing. He took every day at a time and was a larger than life character and the Pointon and York business was founded on sass and really, Walley was the mind behind that more than anyone else.
“I could list twenty or thirty very good people who were around me early on that went on to do all sorts of great things. It was a very powerful team that kept me together in those days!”
You can access the full interview with Steve Harvey on The Leaders in Pensions podcast here.
For further content from Westerby Trustee Services, here you can access an article written for The Parliamentary Review by founder and chairman, Les McLintic, who elaborates on some of the main concerns of pension providers today, and how the consumer can best protect themselves against pension fraud.
