All the way to the top

The market’s expansion has come from a combination of legislation requiring UK employers to enrol all eligible employees into a workplace pension, a shift towards more personal responsibility for retirement planning, and people living, working and saving for longer. ‘Of course, I want every single one of those new customers,’ says Summersgill, ‘but the important thing for the UK is just to get more people investing.’

Being accessible

But the opportunities come with challenges, particularly around engagement and trust. Financial services products such as pensions are inherently complex. ‘Our response is to push for simplification in the rules to make the landscape as easy to navigate as possible for less confident investors,’ he says.

That approach is reflected in AJ Bell’s dual-channel investment platform. One channel is for financial advisers, while the other is designed for individual consumers. ‘We aim to make the process of investing as easy as possible and to drive down prices for customers,’ Summersgill says.

Some potential customers, though, still see the financial services sector through the prism of 1980s excesses and the global financial crisis. ‘I understand the history of bad behaviours, but I find it frustrating, because it’s not an industry I recognise,’ he says. ‘It’s not an industry that I’ve ever worked in.’

Shifting sands

After taking a degree in economics, Summersgill had a brief stint at a practice in the North West. But most of his career has been in financial services at AJ Bell where, over 17 years, he has worked his way up from group financial accountant to CEO.

‘I didn’t set out to have a career as a finance professional,’ he says, explaining that he could see that becoming an accountant was a good way of getting into business.

Although initially ‘excited and motivated’ by the prospect of helping owner-managers with their businesses, he gradually found that he enjoyed the technical challenges of being an accountant and the ways that his ACCA training helped him solve them.

He also greatly enjoyed working at AJ Bell. ‘I believed in what we were doing as an organisation and became deeply invested in our success,’ he says.

It all helped to propel him onwards and upwards, as did a series of events beyond his control: the global financial crisis that hit soon after he joined the company. ‘It showed me the relative stability and long-term nature of the service that we’re providing to customers,’ he says.

The sharp downturn in stock markets was of course reflected in the short term in the value of customer portfolios. But as most of them are invested for over 20 years, customers kept investing through AJ Bell, and the company’s opportunities were not negatively impacted. The company’s plans for an initial public offering (IPO) were put on hold, but this did not impact the growth or success of the business.

The decision to delay the IPO was another factor in Summersgill’s rapid ascent from group financial controller to CFO and board member, at just 27 years old. ‘Had we been on a pre-IPO footing, I don’t think I would have been a viable CFO candidate’, he says. ‘Andy [Bell, founder and then-CEO] and the board would probably have wanted somebody more experienced.’

But the IPO wasn’t dominating board thinking at that time, and Summersgill had advocates in the audit committee chair and in Bell, who appreciated his potential.

Summersgill credits Stuart Dootson, the previous CFO, for helping build his strong reputation ahead of taking on the CFO role himself. ‘Stuart always looked for opportunities to get me involved in board meetings. He was a great advocate, and that gave me confidence and the opportunity to showcase my work.’

Changing chairs

When Summersgill first became CFO, in 2011, moving up to the CEO role hadn’t been the objective. But this changed over time, and his appetite for a broader remit grew when Bell told him he couldn’t ‘go from that chair to this chair’ without having deep operational experience of the business.

Summersgill gained that experience during the eight years he spent as CFO-cum-COO. At the time, taking operational responsibility for AJ Bell felt like the biggest change of his career, but his perspective shifted after he stepped away from operations to become deputy CEO for a year, before moving into the CEO position in 2022.

‘I was set up for success in the CEO role,’ he says. Before taking over, he was able largely to build his own management team, rather than inheriting one. ‘Everyone knew me. I knew everybody. I’d been sat around that table for years. There were no excuses.’

But being CEO was a big change – and in ways that he did not always anticipate. ‘I’d been used to being open and sharing my views,’ he says. But he quickly found that people inside and outside the organisation treated him differently. ‘As CEO, you have a powerful voice and people assume that you are the decision-maker on everything,’ he says, adding that that is not how the business is run.

‘I’ve got a very empowered group of executives, who get on with running the business day to day,’ he says. It’s a continuation of the approach taken by company’s founder when he was CEO. Like his predecessor, Summersgill now has a great many other priorities.

‘As CEO, my job is to focus on the culture and strategy of the business, make sure that we’ve attracted the right senior management team, and that the business is set up in a way that allows them to do a great job,’ he says. ‘I need to network, get out and influence the industry more.’