Rebecca Ellis on the career path that led her from a UK graduate scheme to nine years advising clients across the Middle East.
I sat down with Rebecca Ellis this week to talk about a version of financial planning most UK-based advisers never actually see up close, what it’s like to build a career advising clients scattered across three or four countries at once, from an office in Dubai.
Rebecca is Head of Advice at Titan Wealth International, and day-to-day that means supporting the financial planners around her directly, joining client meetings, working through specific cases, and liaising between providers, tax advisers and accountants to work out what genuinely counts as the right advice for a given client. She’s spent the last nine years living and working in Dubai, the last two of those with Titan Wealth International itself. Her path there wasn’t a straight line, and neither was her path into financial planning in the first place. What came through clearly in our conversation was how many quietly deliberate decisions sit behind a career that, from the outside, looks like it simply happened, decisions about qualifications, about location, and about what kind of role she actually wanted to end up in.
Why University Wasn’t Her First Choice
Before Rebecca ever set foot on a university campus, she’d actually looked into a different route entirely.
She was candid about it when I asked whether she’d do anything differently with hindsight.
“So probably that would be my first choice. But I didn’t find anything. So I ended up going off to university and looking back now, I’m very glad with how everything has turned out.”
An apprenticeship simply wasn’t available locally at the time, and the pay on offer for the ones that did exist would have required living at home, which wasn’t practical for her. University became the fallback option rather than the preferred one, and she was careful to note that she doesn’t know how the apprenticeship landscape has changed since, only that it wasn’t there for her at the time.
Why Her Career Only Works With A Degree
Fast forward to her current role in Dubai, and that university decision turns out to have been quietly load-bearing.
Certain licensed roles in the UAE simply aren’t available to people without a university degree, regardless of experience or alternative qualifications.
Rebecca explained the requirement plainly when we discussed it.
“So the role that I have here and the position I have on the licence in the UAE, you have to have a degree.”
Had she taken the apprenticeship route she originally wanted, she wouldn’t be eligible for the position she holds today. It’s a genuinely useful thing for anyone weighing up their own route into the profession to know, the path that feels like the safer, more conventional choice now can end up being the one that actually opens doors years later, in ways that aren’t obvious at the time.
What Living And Working In Dubai Is Actually Like
A meaningful chunk of our conversation moved away from qualifications and career mechanics entirely, into what life in Dubai is actually like, particularly for a young woman moving somewhere she’d never even visited before.
Rebecca didn’t hedge when I asked her directly about safety.
“I felt completely safe here. We do all sorts of wonderful things. We typically don’t lock our front doors, leave your car keys in the car.”
She was equally candid about the parts of expat life that are less often discussed publicly, how easy it is to build a genuine social circle from nothing within days of arriving, and the strong pull of the city’s fitness culture. Her own office has run training groups ahead of a group triathlon, and cycling communities of every intensity are easy to find nearby, alongside, by her own admission, the odd “Dubai stone” gained along the way from long hours and easy convenience.
Where Her Career Is Actually Heading Next
Despite being fully qualified to advise clients directly, and having picked up a handful of clients along the way, Rebecca doesn’t see her long-term future in client-facing advice.
Her role today is split between supporting the advisers around her and increasingly operational work. One recent example she mentioned was a trip to evaluate a firm in Europe that Titan Wealth International is considering acquiring, looking specifically at its systems and processes to work out what could realistically be integrated into the wider group. She’s completed an MBA and taken part in the firm’s Next Generation Leaders programme, a small cohort drawn from across the group that meets in London to work through group-level challenges together. She increasingly sees her own future leaning toward business strategy rather than advisory work.
It’s a genuinely useful reminder for anyone assuming financial planning careers only move in one direction, toward more client-facing advisory work over time. Rebecca’s path suggests the opposite is just as valid, technical depth and operational expertise can be every bit as valuable a destination as advising clients directly.
If you’re weighing up your own route into financial planning, whether that’s degree versus apprenticeship, UK versus international, or advisory versus operational, this is a conversation worth your full attention. Rebecca’s answers throughout felt less like a tidy career story and more like someone genuinely still figuring it out, in the best possible sense.
🎧 Listen to the full episode with Rebecca Ellis on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
🌐 Learn more about Titan Wealth International at titanwealthinternational.com.
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