First Samuel Limited

"To provide individual, indispensable and enduring relationships that create, manage and protect wealth."

- Anthony Starkins, First Samuel's Founder & Executive Director, when asked by his accountant in 1999 what was First Samuel going to do.

Anthony Starkins returned to Melbourne with his family in 1998 after a lengthy overseas assignment. With funds to invest, he sought a company that would provide his family with a high quality, competent, ethical and integrated wealth management service.

After meeting with private banks, stockbrokers, financial planners and other assorted would-be providers he decided the only way his needs would be met would be if he started a business to do exactly that.

"There is clearly a large and unfilled gap in the market," he thought.

And so, in early 1999, he formed First Samuel. The Company started in a windowless, one-roomed serviced office in Camberwell (a suburb of Melbourne) whilst Starkins researched and built the appropriate business model. In mid 1999, the business moved to Collins Street, Melbourne. Over a number of months the appropriate regulatory licences were obtained, latest technology deployed and specialist Associates appointed. In late 1999 the business commenced.

Starkins now had a business in which he could entrust his family's wealth. And offer to others.

Since then the Company has grown steadily and strongly, and has had to move premises twice to meet the growing client demand. In that time First Samuel has successfully endured a range of financial events, such as the tech-wreck, the Enron scandal, two recessions, 9-11, and more recently, the so-called Global Financial Crisis.  

An affirming imprimatur was given by an external rating agency*, who, when reviewing First Samuel, said, "Mr Starkins has successfully built a unique boutique management organisation based on a strong culture of integrity, with a focus on customer and staff satisfaction, and compliance. First Samuel's business philosophy is firmly aligned with investor interests."

Since the turn of the century many financial institutions have come and gone. But First Samuel and its clients have prospered because of the Company's continual focus on that aspiration first spoken in 1999.

*ASSIRT Ratings, extract from media release issued by Standard & Poor's 6 April 2005.