British-born Andrew Barnes has wasted no time establishing roots down under by creating the country’s largest trustee company, becoming a leading light in philanthropy and developing his own boutique wine business on Waiheke Island.
Having bought Perpetual Trust for $12 million in 2013, Barnes forked out another $68.5m for Guardian Trust in 2014 and promptly merged the two businesses into Perpetual Guardian, which claims more than 130 years of trustee experience, 140,000 will relationships and more than $100 billion in assets under administration or management.
A strong believer in technology and innovation, Barnes has revolutionised digital estate planning services through Kowhiri – New Zealand’s largest digital legal services provider of online wills and will management – which has written more than 3.5 million wills worldwide.
However, plans to sell Perpetual Guardian for $200m to an Australian venture capital company came unstuck in 2017 when the deal was aborted amid a flurry of legal claims which saw Barnes threaten to sue his suitor for $49m in damages before their differences were settled out of court.
Never far from the headlines, Barnes embarked on what was claimed to be a world-first productivity trial in early 2018 when Perpetual Guardian’s 200 staff were offered a free day off every week for six weeks. "If you incentivise people to say 'Gosh, if I can do my work in four days, I get a day off', there's every likelihood that productivity will rise," he says.
A self-proclaimed oenophile, Barnes has running a boutique wine business from his 1.5ha property on Waiheke Island Trading as Postage Stamp Wines. He says he is fascinated by the process of ‘taking a grape and presenting it on a table as part of a fine meal’ and has the aim is to produce premium single variety wines from small vineyards around New Zealand and the world.
Among his other local investments is an 18% stake in the Wellington-based payroll software business, PaySauce, which plans to expand its presence in the agritech sector. Chaired by Barnes, the company has a $10m valuation but has been criticised by the Shareholders Association for seeking a backdoor NXZ listing through Energy Mad.
Raised in northwest England, the 58-year-old achieved a masters of arts in law and archeology at Cambridge University before he joined the Royal Navy as a cadet. His financial services career began at the National Westminster Bank and, after moving to Australia as a 27-year-old, he eventually joined the Macqaurie Group where he became chairman in 1999.
As a philanthropist, Barnes is directing the expansion of Perpetual Guardian’s long-standing philanthropy service that encourages New Zealanders to give whatever they can afford. In addition to providing seed funding for the Perpetual Guardian Foundation, he also sponsored Philanthropy New Zealand’s bi-annual ‘Giving New Zealand’ report and donated $30,000 in 2015 to establish a NZ Bomber Command Fund on the condition that the last Dambusters pilot gifted his war medals to MOTAT.
A finalist in the 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, Barnes is also fond of sailing and has bought the historic Auckland racing yacht, Ariki, with a view to restoring the 113-year-old vessel. He also likes wandering through his vineyard or along the beach to stimulate creative thinking. “I tend to internalise questions or problems, to rely on my gut, so very often I find an answer will come to me while I am pondering a grape.”