About The International Money Academy

The idea for the International Money Academy began at home.

Drew Mitchell has two children, both at international school in Phuket, both growing up with a financial and cultural reality that most traditional education was never really built to address. One was born in Singapore. The other was born in the United Kingdom. Between them they hold different passports, have already lived across more than one country, and are now growing up together in Thailand, moving between currencies and cultures as a completely ordinary part of childhood rather than anything unusual.

Watching his own children grow up this way, alongside years spent advising client families living the same reality as adults, Drew kept returning to the same observation: financial education, where it exists at all, is almost always built around a single country, a single currency, and a single idea of what a "normal" financial life looks like. For his own children, and for the thousands of children like them at international schools across the region, that was never going to be enough.

The International Money Academy was built to close that gap, one story at a time.

The International Money Academy is an initiative of Mitchell International Wealth, an international financial planning and wealth management business serving internationally mobile professionals and families across Southeast Asia.

Mitchell International Wealth was founded to address a problem its own clients faced constantly: financial lives that had genuinely outgrown the advice available to them. Pensions in one country, investments in another, tax residency changing every few years, and a constant, quiet pressure to make long-term decisions with only part of the picture in view. Rather than treating these as separate technical problems to be handled in isolation, Mitchell International Wealth was built around a more integrated approach, helping clients see their financial life as one coherent whole, wherever in the world it happens to be sitting at any given time.

That same philosophy sits behind the International Money Academy. If cross-border financial complexity is the reality our adult clients live with every day, the next generation deserves the chance to grow up genuinely prepared for it, rather than encountering it for the first time in their twenties or thirties, the way most of us did.

Drew Mitchell is the Founder and Managing Director of Mitchell International Wealth, and the creator of the International Money Academy.

Drew's career in international financial services spans more than twenty years, with a particular focus on the distinctive challenges facing professionals and families whose financial lives cross more than one border. He specialises in cross-border financial planning, pensions, investments and long-term wealth preservation, working with clients for whom a single-country approach to financial advice was never going to be enough.

Through Mitchell International Wealth, Drew advises clients directly, helping them bring together pensions, investments, tax residency and long-term planning into one coherent strategy, rather than treating each as a separate problem to be solved in isolation.

Drew's own life has followed much the same international path as the families he advises, and the same path his own children are now growing up on. Over the course of his career he has lived and worked across the United Kingdom, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Doha, Bangkok and Phuket, working closely with families of every nationality navigating exactly the kind of cross-border financial life the Academy's books now bring to life for children, his own included.

Drew is currently undertaking a Doctor of Business Administration at the University of Hertfordshire Business School, researching strategic financial capability and long-term financial decision-making among internationally mobile professionals. The research examines how wealth management organisations can better support clients whose financial lives span multiple countries, currencies and regulatory systems, drawing on behavioural finance, financial capability theory and strategic management to develop a practical, evidence-based framework for the wealth management profession.

The connection to the International Money Academy is a direct one. The same complexity Drew's doctoral research examines in adult professionals, fragmented financial decisions, cross-border blind spots, and advice that too often treats pensions, tax and investments as separate problems rather than one coherent life, is precisely what the Academy is trying to help the next generation avoid growing into. If financial capability is genuinely stronger when it's built early, and built with an international life in mind from the outset, then a five-book adventure series may be doing, quietly, exactly the same work as a doctoral research framework: helping people make better long-term decisions, in a world that rarely stays inside one border for long.

Through his work with Mitchell International Wealth, Drew has built close relationships with international schools and the families they serve across Southeast Asia and beyond, from long-standing corporate clients to school communities in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the wider region.

Those relationships are the foundation the International Money Academy is now building on. Rather than developing a financial literacy programme in isolation and hoping it might suit an international classroom, the Academy has been shaped from the outset by direct conversations with the teachers, parents and school leaders who understand exactly what an internationally mobile student actually needs, and exactly where the gaps in traditional financial education leave them exposed.

To help the next generation of internationally mobile children grow up with genuine financial confidence, wherever in the world their lives eventually take them.

Not confidence built around one currency, one country, or one fixed idea of what a financial life looks like. Confidence built the same way Mitchell International Wealth's own clients are advised: with an integrated, long-term view, a willingness to ask the next honest question, and the patience to build something that lasts considerably longer than any single decision ever could.