Rebecca Swain joined our client services team three weeks ago, and she is already writing reports, submitting new business applications, and working out how to add a trustee to a bare trust. We sat down with her last week to discuss how she is getting on in her first month at Citywide.

Where she sits

Rebecca sits right in the heart of the client relationship, which is the place that keeps everything moving. She takes the first call, deals with as much as she can, and hands it to Matt Burt when the query needs advice. That position suits her, because it shows her the whole shape of the work at once. “It gives you a chance to see the person advising, and also what’s happening at the proper grassroots.”

She wants to advise in her own right eventually. One of the things that made Citywide the best choice for her was the clear route to progression with support behind it; in her words, clear stepping stones.

What the horses taught her

Rebecca is an accomplished dressage champion. Her mother has always ridden, her sister competed seriously, and Rebecca was at the ringside from the age of five, watching a sibling 10 years older do the thing she wanted to do. She started riding that year and never really stopped.
She says that maintaining a long-standing equestrian career is more complicated than she anticipated. A competition horse reaches a peak and then declines, much as an athlete does, so a rider who is serious about the sport starts bringing on the next horse long before the current one retires.

Rebecca had that arrangement running as a teenager: a top horse for the competitions, and a younger one coming through behind it. We are not going to labour the parallel with long-term financial planning here, and she is well aware of it already.

Her fun fact is that she holds an HGV licence, passed at 18 so she could drive the horses to competitions herself, and she can handle anything up to 26 tonnes. In fact, when the country ran short of lorry drivers, a letter arrived at her house asking whether she had thought about doing it for a living.

Why she left London

Rebecca spent three and a half years working in London, most of it in Canary Wharf, before trading the city skyline for greener views and a little more fresh air.

She says: “It’s very much problem-solving. They come to you with an issue, this is what they want, you find out their financial success number, and then you wrap it all together to see how they can achieve that.” Watching Matt do exactly that is what convinced her the seat she is in leads somewhere she wants to go. It is also, she says, the part she would not hand over to anybody else.

If Matt looks after your plan, Rebecca is likely to be the first voice you hear when you call. Please feel free to say hello.