Levene adds that he thinks the range of services provided by some of the older robo-advice companies were quite limited, particularly in terms of the amount of work the client had to do, but that AI can change this.
He says: “The next generation of clients want transparency and ease of access to their information. They don’t want long lunches with three bottles of wine and opaque fee structures.”
Despite his optimism, he is not invested in any of the new wave of robo-advice companies, saying only that he is “monitoring a few options”.
This fits into the broader investment style he deploys, as he avoids early-stage companies, instead maintaining a database of 2,500 such firms “and watching them to understand what they need to do to get to the next stage”.
One company in the wealth management universe in which Levene was invested is Interactive Investor, which was sold to Abrdn in 2022 for £1.5bn.
He expresses some frustration that the business was sold so early, saying: “Instead of selling it as a £1.5bn business, I would rather have been able to keep hold of it and help grow it until it becomes a £10bn business, which it can become, but it was a good investment for us.”
Inside out?
Levene, as the son of Lord Peter Levene, who was Lord Mayor of London, chair of Lloyd’s of London, and an efficiency adviser to Sir John Major, is an unlikely candidate to be a disrupter of establishment interests.
After attending the fee-paying City of London School and Manchester University, he become a management consultant with Bain Group, and was sent to Moscow in the early 1990s, working for the Russian government to talk to Russians to find out about the economic state of their cities.
But one of the things the experience did teach him is that he no longer wanted to be an employee. So he left the rarified world of management consulting to set up what he calls “London’s first juice bar”, which progressed into a chain before he sold it.
It is an acutely tough time to be a technology investor, and Levene says that many investors have lost money recently by looking to invest in the “next big idea”, but instead he views his job as striving to “be 12 months ahead of what the next big thing is”.
