Meet our Investment Committee – Colin Beveridge

We believe it’s important for our clients to know the backgrounds and areas of expertise of the people who manage and look after their investments. In the coming weeks we will be sharing some of their stories with you and introducing you to the team.

This week, we’d like to introduce you to our Chief Investment Officer, Colin Beveridge.

Could you tell me a little about your background/expertise in the financial services industry?

I started my career as an analyst progressing to fund manager and then onto more senior roles where I was responsible for leading investment teams. I have managed all types of funds, but latterly in my career I specialised in managing global equity income portfolios. After almost 30 years in the industry I decided to set up my own company offering global stock selection, delivered online via a model portfolio, for a fixed fee. I then moved onto consultancy work where I accessed academic research to help investment companies to understand and to articulate the core strengths of their investment proposition. This led me to join True Potential in February 2014.

What is your role at True Potential?

My role is that of Chief Investment Officer. I manage a team of 7 people and the team oversees all investment activity which ranges from day to day administration and oversight of our own funds through to managing the 10 True Potential Portfolios. Since joining True Potential my role has continued to evolve, initially it was about working with the senior partners to gain extended regulatory permissions to run our own funds. What followed was devising an independent risk mapping process and finally building a differentiated discretionary fund proposition. Of course all of this has been enabled by others as well, not least the excellent technology capability that we have.

What does an average day look like to you?

I know it’s a cliché to say that no day is the same, however it happens to be true. The good thing about investment is that it is constantly changing and it makes for a varied working life. There are certainly routine tasks that have to be attended to. For example, on a monthly basis I attend and present at the Management Committee meeting, I also have calls with all eight managers and meet with the team to constantly review and agree the rebalancing of the True Potential Portfolios. Every three months we hold our Investment Committee meeting and this requires a lot of preparation work by me. Beyond that I am constantly looking at markets, looking at what’s happening across the portfolios supplemented with a lot of reading, writing and presenting to advisers.

What are you most proud of in your career to date?

I consider myself fortunate to enjoy a job covering a long time-span in an industry where short term considerations have ended careers. This means I must have done something right!

Seriously, I have been most privileged to be able to mentor analysts and fund managers and hopefully pass on some of the things I have learned through my own experience and my own efforts to understand markets. I am particularly pleased to have been able to launch a new fund from scratch and to set up a business gaining regulatory permissions. Both were useful precursors to joining True Potential Investments. The fund launch occurred in 2006, a Kokosai income fund (global ex Japan). This raised a lot of money, and the fund went on to be awarded Best Income Fund (joint) in Japan in 2007.

What do you enjoy most about your current role?

This is easy to answer, it is working with a good team of people to build something that I believe is worthwhile and we are doing this from scratch. When I started working at True Potential Investments back in 2014 the vision of the True Potential partners was for TPI to launch its own funds, to have an independent fund risk mapping process and to offer a discretionary management service to all clients, that would normally only be available to high-net-worth clients. We now have 26 of our own funds with well over £2 billion invested and we have 10 True Potential Portfolios managed on a discretionary basis with assets under management approaching £1 billion. We make no extra charge for our discretionary service and this plays to my own belief that we need to be able to deliver value to clients.

What’s the hardest part of your job?

I believe the hardest part of any job is balancing competing priorities.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I like to relax. However, relaxation for me involves reading a lot, walking a lot, running (not as much as I used to) and cycling. I also have an annual skiing holiday because it is the one activity where my mind truly switches off completely. This is because the risks are higher and relaxing into the risks is accompanied by a sense of exhilaration.

Anything else you think our audience would like to know?

I would just add that my (our) job is not yet done. We can continue to improve what we do, seek out new investment strategies, and hopefully deliver efficiencies that will lower the cost of investing. I am not a champion of the race to the bottom on costs, but I do believe in giving clients best value wherever and whenever it is possible to do so.

As you can see, our investment team are passionate about what they do and work tirelessly with the aim of getting the best out of each Portfolio.

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