Meet The Team

Paul Chafer, Managing Director

Paul has over 20 years experience in retail financial services and is regularly featured in trade and national press commenting on both financial and economic matters. Prior to joining Towergate Financial Paul was a main Board Director at the Stroud and Swindon Building Society and as Commercial Director was responsible for the Sales, Marketing, Product Development, Commercial and Specialist Lending divisions. Paul also chaired the Society’s property company and was a Director of the subsidiary Stroud and Swindon Mortgage Company Limited. Paul is responsible for the strategic direction of Towergate Financial in the East of England.

Mitch Hopkinson, Technical Director

Mitch has worked for some of the biggest names in the financial services industry, including American Express, Midland HSBC and Barclays Life. He created Real Independent Financial Advice Limited before selling the business to M2 (which is now called Towergate Financial) to exploit economies of scale.

Amongst high net-worth clients, he has a reputation for creating sophisticated financial solutions and is recognised as having particular expertise in pension planning, inheritance tax and the use of film partnerships and VCTs to mitigate tax liabilities.

John Hitchcock, Operations Director for Towergate Financial

John is a Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute and has over 20 years experience within the financial services sector. He holds a degree in Banking, Insurance and Risk Management as well as the Certificate in Financial Planning. For the 10 years prior to joining Towergate Financial.

John was the Operations Director for a large composite broker overseeing the compliance andadministrative functions. John’s primary role is to ensure that the service provided by the administration team to customers and corporate partners continues to meet the veryhighest standards as an integral part of the strategic plan.

Andy Hunt, Training and Compliance Officer

He is 43 years old and has been in Financial Services since 1987. He was a founder of Maddison Monetary Management (the original M in m2) in 1997, with ten years as a tied agent before that, six of those being with Acuma, the fee-based financial planning arm of American Express. Based on this, he has considerable experience in dealing with high net worth individuals and fee-based financial planning. Andy holds the G60 Pensions paper and is also the Company’s appointed Pension Transfer Specialist and Money Laundering Reporting Officer.

Gareth Hope, Operations Manager

Gareth has spent most of his career in Financial Services with Towergate Financial initially working in a paraplanning role to assist the advisers in delivering the service and support to the Towergate Financial clients.

He holds the Certificate in Financial Planning. Gareth works alongside John Hitchcock in ensuring that the highest level of service and standards are met across the companies three support offices, drawing on his own experiences in the support team to help achieve this.