NCB Group Chairman Michael Lee-Chin offered valuable investment advice to select clients at an intimate gathering on Monday as the financial institution introduced what it said will be a more growth-based approach to wealth management for customers.

At the evening mixer held at the NCB Wellness Centre in St Andrew, Lee-Chin shared the framework for success while drawing on his personal journey from investment advisor to one of the most successful investors in Jamaica and Canada.

He stressed the importance of having a role model – which in his case was Berkshire Hathaway boss Warren Buffet, who is renowned as the world’s greatest ever investor – learning the formula for success and executing it faithfully.

Another key principle of investing, according to the NCB chairman, is operating off the three P’s – predicting, planning and persevering.

“You don’t create wealth by doing today what everyone is doing today, you create wealth by doing today what people will be doing tomorrow,” Lee-Chin advised.

Against this background, Lee-Chin recalled how he used this principle as a young investor to grow his wealth, noting that in 1983 he had envisioned that there would be a savings and investing boom.

“I thought, ‘Mike, you are 32, at 42 what will the typical North American baby boomer family be doing?’ They are going to wake up and say ‘Oh my gosh I have been consuming for the last many years, looking ahead I have 23 years to retirement and I haven’t saved and invested enough’,” he said.

As part of the plan to capitalise on the predicted development, he borrowed money to purchase $500,000 of Mackenzie Financial stock and used the profit to start his mutual fund company, AIC.

“The mutual fund industry went from $5 billion in total assets in 1983 to $2 trillion today,” Lee Chin noted.

Sticking to his business model today, the NCB boss is predicting a bright future for cancer treatment and nuclear energy. Pointing clients to the former as a potential investment option, he said “You can buy a drug company or you can realise that chemotherapy and external beam radiation have been around for 90 years and are ripe for disruption.

“What is going to disrupt chemotherapy and external beam radiation? It’s called TRT – Targeted radionuclide therapy, using medical radio isotopes to zap the cancer at the cellular level,” he noted.

Meanwhile, with the approaching of the United Nations’ 2050 net zero carbon footprint, he said nuclear energy is an attractive investment.

“We have to change our energy mix… so the new energy mix of every country will be, at the hub, an energy source that has the same positive characteristics (as fossil fuels) but clean. The only energy source that has those characteristics is nuclear. Nuclear is going to be at the epicentre of every country’s energy mix and the spokes will be renewables,” Lee-Chin predicted.

Concluding his address to clients, the NCB chairman noted: “Investing doesn’t have to be speculation… What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions.

“At NCB, this is the type of advice you will get… this is the new NCB,” he said.

Dr Karrian Hepburn Malcolm, NCB’s Head of Wealth Management, said the event was part of the institution’s more customer-centric, needs-based approach to wealth management.

“We are moving from beyond wealth management, which is just safeguarding somebody’s investment, to wealth creation,” Hepburn Malcolm told Observer Online. “Our job is to make you wealthier and in making someone wealthier we need to make sure we take a look at all the financial cornerstones of their portfolio.

“What the consumer will notice is that they will be more exposed to the full depth and breadth of the products and services of the bank,” she continued. “It will be manifested in events, client meetings, presentations in more intimate settings, and (clients) will be able to soon see on our app the advisor assigned to them for each portfolio.”