Our Team
Senior advisors. Direct access. No intermediaries.
Every Whitaker & Ashford client works directly with the partner responsible for their mandate — not with a junior relationship manager or an automated platform.
A team built around fiduciary depth
The financial advisory industry has a structural problem: the people who sell you a product are rarely the people qualified to design the structure behind it. We built Whitaker & Ashford specifically to invert that model. Every advisor on our team holds postgraduate qualifications in finance, law, or risk management and carries a minimum of twelve years' experience in private wealth advisory. None of our advisors hold product distribution licences — a structural choice that eliminates the principal-agent conflict that plagues commission-based practices. When you sit across the table from one of our partners, you are speaking with the person who will design, implement, and be accountable for your capital protection strategy.
The partners at Whitaker & Ashford
A small, senior group — each with a defined area of fiduciary specialisation.
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James Whitaker — Founding Partner
James brings twenty-two years of experience in cross-border private wealth structuring, with a focus on insurance-linked strategies for EU-resident high-net-worth individuals. He holds an LLM in International Tax Law from the University of Vienna and advises clients in four languages.
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Caroline Ashford — Partner, Risk Advisory
Caroline specialises in quantitative risk frameworks and portfolio stress-testing. Before co-founding Whitaker & Ashford, she spent nine years at a Zurich-based risk consultancy covering central and eastern European asset managers. Her work forms the analytical backbone of every client mandate.
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Tomáš Novák — Senior Advisor, Slovak & Czech Markets
Tomáš joined the firm in 2015 and leads client relationships across northern Slovakia and the Moravian border region. He holds a PhD in Financial Law from Masaryk University and coordinates all interactions with Slovak regulatory and legal counterparts on client matters.
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Elena Horváthová — Advisor, Estate & Succession
Elena advises private clients on intergenerational wealth transfer, holding structure design, and family governance frameworks. She qualified as a notary in Slovakia before transitioning to private advisory and brings a rare combination of legal precision and client-facing sensitivity to complex succession mandates.
Our professional standards and regulatory standing
Whitaker & Ashford operates under Slovak law and is registered with the Národná banka Slovenska as an independent financial advisory firm. All advisors are subject to the EU's MiFID II conduct requirements and our internal Code of Fiduciary Conduct, which we publish in full on request. We carry professional indemnity insurance well in excess of regulatory minimums and maintain a client complaints procedure that is independent of the advisory team. Our EU jurisdiction status means your assets and your relationship with us are governed by one of the world's most robust regulatory frameworks — a fact we consider a foundational component of the protection we offer.
“I spent three years working with a large private bank before moving my mandate to Whitaker & Ashford. The difference is stark: here, my calls are returned by the partner, not passed to an associate. My annual review is a substantive conversation, not a slide deck presenting last year's returns. The firm is smaller, yes — but the quality of thinking and the accountability are in a different category entirely.”
Martin Š., Trenčín — private client since 2017
Speak directly with a partner.
Introductory calls are handled by James or Caroline personally. We do not operate a general enquiries queue.