Broker on how going into financial services at 18 paid off
Faced with either getting a university education or earning, Jack Goguelin (pictured) was clear that money came first. It was a decision that’s arguably paid off, because today, as a mortgage broker, he heads up his own business, Convici Capital, that works with high net worth investors in lucrative locations such as London, Dubai and the Channel Islands – and money is still important to him.
“I think everybody who runs a business does it for money, and potentially freedom,” Goguelin told Mortgage Introducer. “I really enjoy the freedom of being a founder-owner of my own business. I wasn't keen on going to university. I had a lot of older friends who’d done it and came out with, you know, an art degree and a lot of student debt. So it wasn't really exciting for me. I did my A-levels and went straight into financial services at 18. I'm from Jersey, in the Channel Islands, and there's a huge financial services industry there - you don't need a degree to get into it. I think back then it probably appealed because it was a nine-to-five job that paid the most and didn't sound like too much like hard work, but that would have been my 18-year-old brain!”
Goguelin opted for a small independent trust company, where he worked for about eight years and obtained a good grounding. “When I got into finance, I actually really enjoyed the real estate side of financial services specifically, so be that buying, selling and then refinancing property transactions,” he explained. “Financial services in general can be a bit like Groundhog Day - you know… quarterly this, monthly that, annual accounts, and that can be pretty boring. But the transactional side of real estate in financial services I found pretty interesting. So I started there, trained in accountancy, and worked on some big real estate fund structures.”
Goguelin rapidly moved upwards through his career, working for bigger firms, including heading up the Dubai business of Enness Global – a mortgage and debt broker for high and ultra-net-worth individuals and entities. In 2023, he set up Convici Capital, which offers services such as mortgage lending, financial consulting, real estate and commercial lending.
“The financial upside of running your own businesses is interesting,” he reflected. “You can do things that probably other people can't do. Being an employee working in someone else's business, you can probably earn a good base salary, you probably get a limited number of holidays a year, you're going to be limited in your travel, and you're going to be limited in the work that you do for that business by the people who run that business. If I want to go to Saudi Arabia next week to meet a client, I can do that in this business. I would like to build something over the next five or 10 years that's scalable and saleable. Then when we come to sell in 10 years, there's probably – hopefully - a decent amount of money that we can make on that exit, rather than retiring with a state pension or maybe a private pension from your financial services employer.”
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The reward of client interaction
What is it that Goguelin most enjoys about his job? “The people that we meet,” he explained.
“My clients are usually pretty interesting folks. We deal with high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals almost exclusively. These are entrepreneurial people who have property all around the world and are in and out of Dubai and London. They are significantly wealthy individuals, so yes, the people that we deal with are pretty cool people to talk to - some of them are really humble. They are all materially wealthy, but some of them might not be high income, and that's another difficulty that we have to overcome sometimes. Some of them might be zero income but lumpy capital gains.”
Given the high value of the transactions that Convici Capital oversees, it doesn’t seek to do a huge volume and last year it dealt with around 15 deals, the smallest of which was £2 million of debt. Most of the cases that Goguelin works on are real estate, but he has recently been sorting out 11m EUR of yacht finance for a Saudi entrepreneur.
In his view, a good broker must always act openly. “Be transparent specifically around fees and if something goes wrong, pick up the phone,” Goguelin urged. “Banks often change products, financial crises can happen, Trump can put in some tariffs - things go wrong. Don't hide. Obviously you need to try and fix it, but call or visit the client - even better, if you're in the same place. Explain what's happened, go armed with a plan to say, ‘The bank’s pulled the product, but this is what we're going to use to remedy the situation’. You just need to be ready to deal with that and meet it head on.”
He added: “Treat everybody the same. I would speak to you as I would speak to my client, as I would speak to a lender. Then, you don't really ever get caught out in a lie or being false. That’s something that I try to do. Some people might think that they do this, but in my experience they don't. So, just try to be yourself.”
