Our shareholders

Boring Money is a start-up and (boringly) not cheap to run. We have raised some funds from external shareholders who are named here and include:

• Holly Mackay (our founder and CEO)
• Aberdeen Standard – one of the Europe’s largest fund managers, and a minority shareholder, who own 11% of the business
• John Levin –founded Telecoms Warehouse amongst other things and now has fingers in many clever pies including insurance and tech
• John Stone – built a huge business called Lombard International and now chairs a big adviser business which deals mostly with expats
• David Hawkins, Richard O’ Donohoe and Philip Borel – founded and/or work for a B2B media play called PEI International; David and Richard also advise and invest in other small businesses
• Sheila Bradshaw – Sheila’s late husband Paul was and is an all-round legend and was an unofficial mentor, friend, “work Dad” and ass-kicker to Holly! Sheila and son Chris have continued to support the business which means a lot.  
• Mark Dampier – is the Research Director at platform Hargreaves Lansdown and owns 1.7% of the business.

Conflicts disclosure

Clearly we need to be aware of potential conflicts with Aberdeen Standard who make financial products. We do not currently review any of their products on our site. If we do we will note this after the relevant comment or article.

They have just finalised a deal with Virgin Money to run the investment part of that business. We do currently review Virgin Money. However as we only test their general investment account which is offline and out-of-date today, we’re not that complimentary about it so feel comfortable no-one can read any bias into our largely negative comments! To be fair we should say that we understand the ISA journey to be better but we haven’t tested that – HMRC rules only allow people to open one ISA account a year!

Mark Dampier is a director of Hargreaves Lansdown. We do cover and rate this platform as part of our research. He invests in Boring Money in a personal capacity. Mark’s been investing for donkey’s years (borderline cheeky!?) and will occasionally contribute up-to-date and personal views on markets to our site. He won’t comment on Hargreaves Lansdown, be involved with our research team nor be involved in any pitching for research or consultancy work we do for Hargreaves Lansdown.

Frankly we’re not going to threaten the trust that we work so hard to build by sucking up to any one firm because someone who works there owns less than 2% of us.