Archives: Ambassadors

Magdalena Smith, brings her experience from McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and as an academic at University of Cambridge where she taught governance and business ethics, together to contribute to solving the challenge of creating more and consistent alpha in the investment industry. Behaviour Lab’s mission is to improve the way the world makes investments, using behavioural science to capture more alpha, and ensuring world class governance, through clear transparency of robust decision-making processes.

CEO and founder of marketßeta where he is responsible for developing the business strategy, delivering client solutions via financial service consultancy and ETF services.

In addition to over 20 years of asset management experience, Graeme spent 3 years in Investment Banking where he managed regional sales teams and global delta one products.  Graeme began his career with Scottish Amicable Investment Managers.  He spent 7 years at Barclays Global Investors (now BlackRock) where he held a number of senior positions in the Index business and helped build the iShares product range.  Graeme launched and ran the first iShares products in Europe.  He joined JPMorgan in 2007 building a highly successful equity derivative sales team, with a strong focus on delta one products.  Most recently Graeme built and led the multi asset Transition Management Business for Legal & General and was responsible for their ETF Business.

Graeme was educated in Scotland with a Master of Arts from the University of Glasgow and a Post Graduate Diploma from the Robert Gordon University

Graeme brings a unique combination of both sell-side and buy-side industries with a focus on using technology to build scalable business and process for multi asset portfolio management and solutions.

Graham began his career as a qualified software architect and consultant analyst working with a list of blue chip companies including IBM, Marconi, Nortel and the Industrial Bank of Japan. His passion for intelligent, independent investing led him to found a brokerage for real estate and non-mainstream investments and discovered the massive challenges that industry faces in the UK. In response, in 2017 Graham launched a ground-breaking start-up, Diligent Eye (diligenteye.com) with a mission to change an industry for the better. Diligent Eye operates from the ground up by assisting investors and brokers to make intelligent and informed decisions about the quality of the investment choices they make every day.

John Dashfield is a highly experienced business coach and mentor to financial planners, owners of SME’s and key employees. He is author of the book ‘The client-centred financial adviser’, published in 2015.

At the core of his work is teaching and coaching clients in the principles behind healthy psychological functioning. This naturally leads to clearer thinking, increased well-being and spiritual integrity.

A significant amount of his time is spent working with financial advisers who want to move from a providing a transactional service to creating a transformational client experience. He has been privileged to work with some of the UK’s leading financial planning practitioners.

Prior to his coaching business John owned a thriving financial advisory practice which he founded in 1991 and sold in 2005. His working life began with a high street bank before moving to AMP Society in 1986. At AMP he was a pensions technical adviser and managed the personal pensions department.

Robert has worked in financial services since graduating in the 1980s in various technical and client-facing roles and is currently a branch principal at Bloomsbury Wealth, a small financial planning and wealth management firm based in the City of London.  He introduced graphical representations of the costs and charges that the firm’s clients were paying several years before such disclosure became mandatory and believes that better decisions about value can be made when people have clear data.

He served on the committee of the London branch of the Institute of Financial Planning and subsequently as a member and latterly Chair of its Education Committee.  He is now a member of the Editorial Panel for the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment.

In addition to having won several categories in the prestigious Money Management Financial Planner of the Year awards and twice being a member of the winning team in a national financial planning competition, he has contributed to numerous press articles including the ‘Money makeover’ series for the Financial Times.

He has held the internationally recognised Certified Financial Planner™ licence since 1997.

Claire Noyce has been Deputy Chairman of the Quoted Companies Alliance since October 2019.

Claire is founding partner and CEO of Hybridan LLP, an AIM broker and adviser, dedicated to fundraising, share price support and providing market-driven corporate finance advice.

Claire was previously at Nomura in the UK Small Cap Life Sciences and Technology Sales and Trading team, where she sold equities to UK and Continental European investors. Prior to joining Nomura, Claire was an equity analyst at Lazard, with a significant  involvement in IPOs and capital market transactions. Claire started her career as an analyst and consultant at Datamonitor. Claire has a Double Honours Degree from Manchester University, where she also undertook some postgraduate studies. Claire is a mentor at Manchester University.

Ian Tyler is a Senior Advisor for Alvarez & Marsal with over 35 years experience in Financial Services, covering leadership roles in treasury for a number of major UK banks, before moving to professional services in 2011. Mr. Tyler is an expert in all aspects of capital management (from issuance through to capital planning and stress testing), and both policy and practical aspects of: liquidity risk, funding, interest rate risk in the banking book, non-trading FX, FTP, large exposures and intra group limits.

Some of Mr Tyler’s most recent roles include: Head of Non-Traded Market Risk and then Group Head of Capital in RBS Group; Group Treasurer of Tesco Bank (member of Executive Leadership); and as a Partner leading the Financial Institutions Treasury Advisory Team in Deloitte. Mr. Tyler has been involved in numerous complex projects relating to a treasury function, which include: (1) leading the Treasury work-stream formed by RBS, Santander and Fortis before, during and after the acquisition of ABN AMRO; (2) being seconded to Tesco from RBS to lead the Regulatory Business Plan and gain approval from the FSA so that change of control could occur for Tesco Bank in December 2008. Here, he built up a treasury function from scratch and was a member of the Executive Leadership and Board attendee for 4 years in what is one of the UK’s largest challenger retail banks; (3) worked for many of the UK’s established challenger banks on a wide range of projects including building a new FTP system for Virgin Money, helping Sainsbury’s Bank develop a new funding strategy and then execute an initial securitisation, strategic evaluation of M&S’s financial services partnership with HSBC, assisting Bank of Ireland UK to switch to the use of derivatives to hedge interest rate risk, reviews of IRRBB approach and Treasury Risk capability for Metro Bank.

Whilst the majority of his treasury work has been for banks, his list of advisory clients also includes Central Banks, Government departments, Supra-nationals, Insurance Companies, Asset Managers, Commodity Trading firms, Payment Services firms and various Corporates. Selected highlights from Mr. Tyler’s line-management and professional services roles include: (1) leading the UK’s first ever regulated mortgage securitisation issue and first ever USD preference share issue; (2) assisting a number of firms both in the UK and US as they have undertaken the detailed process to obtain a new banking license; (3) assisting a Supra-national significantly enhance its financial risk management framework including policies, risk measures and treasury operational capabilities to facilitate them accessing the Debt Capital Markets with an AAA rating

His body of work also includes working on numerous Due Diligence engagements on potential and actual acquisitions/disposals across the globe. He has led, or assisted on, a wide variety of stress testing projects for both UK and non UK entities covering both liquidity and capital related stresses and taken a lead role in producing a number of Working Capital reports for UKLA prospectuses.

Mr. Tyler is a member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and has a Master of Arts in Mathematics from Cambridge University. He is currently a trustee for two charities, a Non Executive Director for both a London based Fintech as well as a UK regulated global online trading platform. He is also the Chairman for a firm seeking a UK banking license to offer an enhanced customer current account proposition to students and workers coming to the UK from overseas.

Chris is responsible for our business development, marketing and client teams. He has been in the investment industry for over 27 years at BlackRock and Bank of America / Merrill Lynch helping institutional clients achieve better outcomes.

Having started his career in investment at the London Stock Exchange during Big Bang, Mikkel spent many years in asset management marketing and IFA support roles at Fidelity, Prudential, Prolific (now Aberdeen Standard) and Société Générale (Man GLG), and was then founding Head of Marketing at the innovative residential property investment company, Castle Trust.  This all contributed to an understanding of good product governance and clear client communication, earning Plain English Campaign Crystal Marks for his client-facing literature.

Mikkel subsequently morphed into dealing with regulatory developments as the Regulatory Manager for fund data provider Financial Express (now FE fundinfo), helping them to provide document and data solutions that deliver greater disclosure under UCITS, PRIIPs, MiFID II and other UK and European regulations.