Back in 1994
That is Sean’s role now – but he began life as a ‘paraplanner’ in 1994. “It was called administration back then,” he muses. “But the job was primarily report writing, so it was not too far removed from the core of the paraplanning role these days.”
After gaining a postgraduate qualification in Administration Law, Sean started his working life in London with The Foresters, a Canadian insurance company, as a benefits calculations specialist. He stayed with that company for around 10 years but moved back to Northern Ireland to start a family. A job with a small general insurance brokers called W.G. O’Kane began his route into paraplanning when the company added a financial advisory arm under the leadership of Tom Leonard and Joe McFeely. “They wanted to do things as professionally as possible and they liked the fact that I had a lot of qualifications and experience in financial services and they took me on as administrator, office manager and report writer. Sean was to work with Tom Leonard a number of years, as O’Kanes was taken over by Open and Direct (part of Northern Ireland Electricity), then bought out by Leonard and renamed Analysis NI, and then acquired by Towry Law. But in 2012 Towry took the strategic decision to close the office and make the staff redundant.
Sean takes up the story: “I’d taken my time gaining qualifications over the years and ironically, on the day I was officially made redundant was the day I took the last of the exams I needed to become a chartered financial planner.
“When I was made redundant, there weren’t many financial advisers around the north west of Northern Ireland, but outsourced paraplanning was mentioned to me as an option and that was when I got in touch with Damian Davies, founder of The TimeBank. He took me through their processes, got me to do a case study and then I flew over to meet him and the team and be interviewed face to face.”
Moving to an outsourced role has had several benefits, Sean says, not least that working from home means he has more flexibility over his working day, “as long as I get the work done”. On the downside, he says, “I sometimes miss working in an office and having that daily banter about things. But at The TimeBank we are constantly on Skype with one another and on the phone, so there’s a good connection there – a virtual office environment if you like, even though we’re hundreds of miles apart.
It’s also a collaborative team, he explains. “For example, I had a question the other day around shareholder protection for loan back that I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure on because I’d not dealt with one before. I posted the question and straight away John Jaffray comes back to me saying he’d done one of them before. We spoke over the phone, he talked me through it and we got it sorted. Other times people refer you to pertinent websites and reading matter. It works well.”
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