Our Founder

Adrian Lawrence founded SMF Capital to close a gap he kept running into across the rest of his recruitment group: FCA Senior Manager Function appointments were being treated as ordinary senior hires with a regulatory form attached at the end, when the accountability they actually carry demands a fundamentally different kind of search from the first conversation onward.

Early Career and Chartered Qualification

Adrian qualified as a Chartered Accountant with the ICAEW and built his early career inside finance functions rather than in professional practice alone, giving him direct, hands-on experience of the operational and governance pressures that a Finance Director, CFO or senior compliance officer actually faces — not just the technical accounting standards a qualification tests for. That combination of technical grounding and genuine operating experience, including as Finance Director of a listed company, has shaped how he’s built every recruitment practice since: a search should be run by someone who has actually sat in the seat, or close to it, not someone assessing a role from the outside alone.

Founding FD Capital

Adrian founded FD Capital in 2018 to give growing UK businesses access to senior finance leadership — fractional, interim and permanent Finance Directors and CFOs — without the overhead or inflexibility of a traditional executive search process built for much larger companies. The practice grew quickly by specialising deliberately rather than trying to cover every finance role: FD Capital placed Finance Directors and CFOs specifically, at every engagement type, and built a genuinely deep candidate network as a result.

As FD Capital’s client base grew, a recurring pattern emerged: an increasing share of the CFO and Finance Director searches landing on Adrian’s desk carried an FCA Senior Manager Function designation attached to them — SMF2 for a regulated firm’s Chief Finance function, SMF16 or SMF17 where compliance and financial crime oversight needed covering alongside the finance role. Handling these searches properly meant understanding the SMCR framework in real depth, not just the finance function itself.

Building Out the Wider Group

That regulatory specialism, combined with growing demand across board-level, C-suite and below-director-level appointments, led Adrian to build out four further practices alongside FD Capital: Exec Capital for C-suite and board-level search, NED Capital for non-executive director and governance appointments, Accountancy Capital for qualified finance recruitment below director level, and most recently SMF Capital, focused specifically on the FCA Senior Manager Function appointments that had become a growing thread running through all of the others.

Each practice is built around a genuine specialism rather than a generic recruitment offering stretched across every seniority level — a structure that reflects Adrian’s own view that recruitment quality comes from deep, specific expertise in a defined area, not breadth for its own sake.

Why SMF Capital

SMF Capital exists because Adrian kept encountering the same failure pattern across searches that carried an SMF designation: the fitness and propriety assessment the FCA would eventually require was treated as a final compliance step, handled once a hiring decision had effectively already been made, rather than the organising principle of the search itself. A candidate who looked right on paper and cleared a standard interview process would then generate follow-up questions during Form A, or, worse, would turn out months into the role not to have the specific, sector-relevant regulatory experience the designation actually demanded.

Adrian built SMF Capital to fix that specifically — testing every candidate against the exact fit and proper standard the FCA will apply, from the first conversation, across every executive and non-executive SMF designation. He leads every search personally rather than delegating candidate assessment to a wider team, on the view that judging genuine regulatory readiness isn’t a task that scales well without the same person understanding the regulatory context, the firm’s specific situation, and the candidate’s real fit, consistently, throughout.

Approach to Search

Across all five practices, Adrian’s approach is built around a few consistent principles: specificity over general seniority, since “experienced” and “regulated firm background” are not, on their own, useful qualifications for a specific SMF designation; realistic timelines, communicated honestly from the outset rather than glossed over to win a client’s confidence; and personal accountability for every search, meaning Adrian is genuinely involved in every mandate his practices take on, not simply the public face of a larger delivery team.

Published Research and Thought Leadership

Adrian writes regularly across the group’s sites on topics of genuine substance in his areas of expertise — from the mechanics of the SMCR and FCA enforcement patterns to practical guidance on EBITDA normalisation and finance team structure. The detailed designation guides, Knowledge Centre references and Insights analysis published on SMF Capital reflect the same standard: written from direct search experience, not as a restatement of the FCA Handbook.