Mike Abbott


Financial Wealth Consultant and Silverhall Wealth Owner

When studying economics at university it dawned on me that money really does drive the direction of travel of our societies. It’s the currency we use to align our incentives and humans are driven inexorably by incentives. Our history books tell us stories of economic realities driving the conquests, tragedies, inventions and transformations that are our history, our story.  It was there that I realised our ancient philosophies are now expressed in our economic lives. I then became fascinated with financial markets and how they bring to life these incentives and give rise to our worst instincts and our most complex problems. Toward the end of my studies, I became very ill and ended up being mostly bed-bound for 18 months. I spend this time studying eastern philosophies, and particularly Buddhism. It was here I came to understand how much of our behaviour can be driven by largely unconscious fears and desires and how important an ethical framework is for internal discipline. I continued this enquiry with a 12-month course in Neuro-Linguistic programming (NLP) which provided a ‘model’ framework for how the mind works. 


After my illness I started my working career at Investec Private Bank in South Africa and became involved in an interesting project to bring all the different product areas of the bank into one sales/service centre where the advisers working there would be trained across all product areas. It was an ambitious project indeed and I had a visionary boss who became an important mentor for me. Importantly, it was there that the idea arrived for me that advice…if was to truly be good advice…needed to be independent. By independent it needed to be unconstrained by the ownership of any product house. It also needed to be formed on an understanding of wholesale financial markets (as they sit behind and drive retail financial products) and an understanding of the workings of the human mind. In a way I had a sense of the importance of behavioural finance before it was even formed as a subject by that name. That’s where it all started for me. Ever since then I’ve been in pursuit of the purest financial advice model I could construct. At Sable Wealth I extended an independent advice model out of the UK and into a cross-border context covering jurisdictions such as the US, Europe and South Africa. With Sable Wealth having corporate ownership there was one last constraint I needed to drop. Silverhall Wealth is the final result: informed, research driven, evidence based and completely independent. That’s the way I like it!