Woodford Investment Management has made senior appointments to strengthen its compliance and operations team.
Woodford, which has £8 billion (€10 billion) of assets under management and advice, has appointed Simon Osborne as head of compliance and Gavin St. John-Heath as chief risk and operations officer.
The appointments aim to bring together a team who will identify, measure, and manage operational and regulatory risks, as the firm continues to grow.
Simon Osborne joins Woodford from Los Angeles-based Nuveen Investments, where he worked as senior vice president from 2010. Osborne also has eight years’ experience managing teams in compliance divisions at Pimco in London and the US.
Gavin St. John-Heath will join Woodford from BlueQuant Capital Management in January 2015. He has over eight years’ experience in a number of senior risk management and compliance roles across various market sectors, working with companies such as Petronas Energy Trading.
David Brailsford and Vimal Patel have also joined the team, as data architecture delivery manager and business analyst, respectively. Brailsford joins from IBM while Patel has moved from Abu-Dhabi-based sovereign wealth manager Mubadala Development Company, where he was head of investment systems.
Craig Newman, chief executive, Woodford Investment Management, anticipates increasing demands on legal and compliance operations as the business continues to expand.
He says: “We have brought in experienced specialists to help implement procedures, which will cement our goal of building a fund management company that has the cutting-edge operational platform needed in a regulation-heavy, post-financial crisis world.”
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