Career
He built his first business at 19 years of age - Cranbrook Street Recording Studios - after leaving school in the 1980s but did not enter into financial services industry until the 1990s when, after a brief spell at what is now Threadneedle Asset Management, he turned down a place to read law at Cambridge University to join the board of discount investment broking firm Willis Owen. Penniston-Hill identified a gap in the market and brokered a deal with six of the United Kingdom’s largest Fund Managers (Justice of the Peace Morgan, Jupiter, Threadneedle, M&G, Newton and Aviva) to launch a national investment campaign on a level previously unseen. He secured distribution in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday, together with branding rights from the two Telegraph titles and produced five million supplements for these papers for the final Personal Equity Plan season.
This has resulted in attracting both praise and criticism.
Financial services industry trade paper Money Marketing openly admits that Penniston-Hill’s company is “taking the moral high ground regarding the way the industry structures its costs”. On the other hand, Tony Levene, of the Guardian, writing in his Correspondent’s Week column for Money Marketing describes Penniston-Hill - admittedly with his tongue firmly in his cheek - in a very different light.
“Office to lunch with the Anti-Christ. But the Prince of Darkness is late--even later than me--as he manages to lose himself in Clerkenwell"s alleys When Satan, aka Julian Penniston-Hill of trail commission-grabbing Intelligent Money fame, sits down, we realise we have spoken before.
He invented those IFA Industry Standard Architecture booklets which used to fall out of newspapers (not The Guardian).“
Penniston-Hill has been regularly quoted in most United Kingdom newspapers, including the Financial Times, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and The Express, and specialist financial websites such as Citywire.
He has also been featured and interviewed on ITN news and the weekly British Broadcasting Corporation financial programme Moneybox. Penniston-Hill also makes regular appearances and answers live phone-in sessions on investing and saving for the British Broadcasting Corporation in Nottingham, where Intelligent Money is based.
