John Banovic

"It’s not just the big things like pensions. They’ve supported me with advice at every stage, always with my best interests in mind."

My name is John Banovic, and I’ve been working with Butler Toll for nearly 25 years. I’ve dealt an awful lot with Andy Westall and, more recently, with Alex.

About 25 years ago, I came out of working for a major PLC and set up an international design company. When I became self-employed, I initially needed a range of different financial products, and bit of advice, so we branched out from there as the company grew and I needed different products.

How I found Butler Toll is quite amusing because Andy Westall and I used to play rugby together. It’s quite important to me that whom I do business with – I need to trust and know them.

I’ve been working with Andy Westall for many, many years, but he’s now stepped back into taking more of an ambassadorial role. Alex joined the organisation quite a while ago now, and once we met, we hit it off and bonded pretty quickly. One of the things I most like about Alex is he doesn’t hit me with too many contact points; I get just about the right amount of contact.

So, what made me choose Butler Toll is a variety of different things, but I think the number one was trust. This was somebody and an organisation who’d been around, with a good track record, and I could trust them. They also had integrity, and I knew the results they were providing to their clients were also very solid.

Over the years, I think the two most important things they’ve given me advice on was who to approach for a quite complicated couple of mortgages on property. They didn’t provide it, but they put me in touch with the right people. The thing that they provided was the creation of an executive pension fund.

When I work with the team at Butler Toll, I don’t see them that often, but it always feels like meeting with somebody you’ve known for a long time. It might sound a bit corny, but it’s a bit like bumping into an old friend; you don’t see them that often, but when you do, they know where you’re at and you know where they’re at.

When I look at the financial future I’ve got from the advice and products that Butler Toll has given me, I feel cautiously confident. It’s an oxymoron, “cautiously confident”, but we’re now dealing with an executive pension fund, which is a drawdown product that I’ve got to make sure delivers. At this moment in time and over the last few years, it’s done very well in a very difficult market.

I am very happy with them, and if I weren’t, I would do something about it. I personally appreciate the monthly updates I get from the economic outlook. As someone who studied economics, I find that succinct, to the point, and really bang on with where things are. Also, Jeremy’s advice on what to invest in and how equities and funds are doing really gives me a sense of reassurance.

In the time I’ve worked with Butler Toll, the absolute best piece of advice they gave me was when I was coming up to five years before potential retirement; it was about maximising all the pension credits I could get. We went back over three years and got the maximum available, and so the top-up that I was able to add to my pension has really paid dividends.

I would recommend Butler Toll’s people and have done so to some of my very close friends. The sort of people who are going to get on with Butler Toll are not looking for the large London-based organisations, but somebody who is big enough, but not too big to miss that personal contact and be there when you need to get hold of something.