About Us

We provide expat investors with a diverse range of  offshore investment structures that are flexible, secure & generally of lower cost to access high quality global Fund Managers as well as direct shares, ETF’s, Bonds and specialist Structured Note investments.

 

Quality Sustainable Investing………. Ethical Business Practices

 

My name is Stephen Strowger and I am the founder of Ethical Offshore Investments.

 

My career in financial services started back in 1988 when I joined the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. After obtaining a dealers licence (via Commonwealth Securities) in 1998, a career change saw me moving to an accounting firm where I was the qualified financial planner, dealing predominately with Retirement and Estate Planning strategies.

 

An opportunity to work overseas in Asia became a possibility and I made the move to Asia in 2008, working for a global wealth management company, initially as an advising consultant but later moving to the position as a Private Client Adviser and head of the Portfolio Management team.

 

Unfortunately, it was my time working in the offshore financial industry where I witnessed, well there is no nice way of saying it, some very questionable activities taking place by certain participants in the industry. This would be in the form of recommendation of certain products (not appropriate for the client but paying big commissions to the adviser), the non discolure (hiding) of fees & charges and the placement of investments into schemes that were not regulated or even researched. It didn’t sit well with me…. Especially when many affected clients of other advisers approached me for assistance and I had to explain to them what had been done.

 

As a result of what I witnessed, I decided to make a stand and establish Ethical Offshore Investments……. providing information and guidance on how to invest in quality assets in sustainable way which would benefit investors now & well into the future……. but providing this guidance in an ethical manner. This means full disclosure….

 

I am associated with Offshore Investment Brokers (Asia) Ltd which is a regulated and authorised wealth management firm, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. All of the clients that I provide a service for via Ethical Offshore come under the strict regulations (and consumer protection) as set out by the Labuan Financial Services Authority.

 

So how do we get paid..??

 

This does depend on the service that we are providing.

 

If we are providing a Portfolio Management service, there is a management charge transaction that is deducted from the portfolio, either on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on the platform being used. This is fully disclosed and agreed to by the client before we commence.

 

As explained in the Portfolio Management section, by charging a fee and not being in receipt of fund commissions, this ensures that we are proposing what we believe are the best funds for the clients personal needs and investment objectives….. and not investing in certain funds because they may pay a commission.

 

We also get paid for the setting up of a new product which is once again, fully disclosed & agreed to by the client prior to the application process. This will either be in the form of a % being deducted from the invested amount or when using certain product structures, like the ones issued by a Life Company, a commission amount being paid by the Life Company. This second option generally results in 100% of the clients money being invested from day 1, but there would be a deferred establishment fee charged to the client over a period of time (usually over 5 or 8 years) to pay for the ‘commission’ paid to us.

 

We do stress the point that this type of structure can result in an early surrender charge being imposed if clients close their accounts prior to the commission payment being fully recovered from the establishment fee.

 

We have provided more information on charges (& how to potentially reduce them) in our section Full Transparency – what is the real cost of investing.

 

We work with a range of different financial product providers that can assist with not only wealth and portfolio management, but Estate and Trust solutions, Offshore Company establishment (& management), Pension management and transfers, Regular Savings products a well as Offshore Bank Accounts and Lending Products.

 

My focus is that of providing portfolio management guidance on investing in high quality, sustainable investment entities at the lowest cost possible, without bias. Examples of the Sustainable Ethical Allocation Portfolios can be found by clicking here 

 

For investors that have existing policies or portfolios elsewhere that are not happy with their current arrangements, we can provide a review service of the existing policy / portfolio and report back on how our service or strategy would benefit that investor. In many cases, this just ends up being a ‘switch of adviser’ situation where we get appointed as the new adviser on the existing policy / portfolio, where we re-structure the current policy to reduce costs and/or increase the portfolio performance. As per above, everything we do is first Fully Disclosed and agreed to by the client.

 

Quality Sustainable Investing ….. Ethical Business Practices

Speak with us to see if we can improve your financial situation