Firing Line: Charles Garthwaite

In the past 25 years Mr Garthwaite has built up an impressive record in helping turn around and improve the companies he has worked for.

This month Mr Garthwaite will take on the role of chief executive of Fund Partners, the trading name used for the merged Way Fund Managers and Fund Partners business.

The former chief risk manager of Aegon UK used the end of his four years at the Edinburgh-based provider to take what may have seemed like a well-earned career break. In reality he was doing what he feels he does best, helping what may at first appear to be a lost cause.

When he finished at Aegon UK at the end of December 2013 Mr Garthwaite and his wife Camilla travelled to Sumatra in Indonesia to help the campaign to save the Sumatran orangutan, the most endangered of the two orangutan species.

He said: “They depend on high-quality primary forests, and the destruction of the forests there could eventually push the species to extinction.”

Conservation is a life-long passion of Mr Garthwaite’s, and he admitted he felt humbled by his visit to the jungle: “There are some amazing people trying to do some amazing things out there. But the fact is if the destruction of the forests carries on at the rate it is now there will not be enough jungle to support a viable population.

“Young orangutans are also captured and sold on as pets and their mothers killed. We were able to see the help the campaigners offer to both wild and rehabilitated orangutans.”

Mr Garthwaite keeps his conservation work and career separate, although he does admit there are parallels with what is happening to both the financial world and the world in which the primates are fighting to survive.

“The world is changing very rapidly every day,” said Mr Garthwaite. “I was only away a few months and there have been some tremendous changes. One obvious change was in this year’s Budget announcement on pensions. One announcement and then you have got customers moving away from fixing their pension pots, that is a tremendous change to deal with.”

As someone who has been at the coalface of regulatory upheaval, Mr Garthwaite is no stranger to change, but views it as an opportunity rather than a problem.

“The changes announced in this year’s Budget will present some of our partners in the asset management space with some huge opportunities.”

It is this positive approach, he admits, which has made him the go-to man when it comes to steering an organisation through change.

He said: “One of the reasons why I was an attractive candidate to Fund Partners was because of my experience as a chief risk officer, which means I have the ability to manage the regulator very well.”

“My remit at Fund Partners is going to be to turn a small but perfectly formed organisation into something much bigger while maintaining its high standard of processes and internal controls systems.”

Mr Garthwaite, who trained as an accountant, joined Price Waterhouse as a trainee in the late 1980s. He was posted to Sydney where he learned about risk management, corporate finance and outsourcing consulting.

It was a baptism of fire because at that time the Australian finance industry was dealing with the introduction of superannuation, not to mention huge changes in the regulatory regime. “I was able to bring that knowledge back to the UK, just as the FSA was being formed,” he said.

Mr Garthwaite’s entrepreneurial spirit and knowledge of regulation led him to leave PwC to set up his own consultancy.

Within a couple of years he was taken on by Charles Thomson to work on the Equitable Life rescue team.

He said: “That period of my career I am very proud of, to take what had been a failing company and then manage to salvage something from it.”

After working at Britannic and its transition to Resolution, Mr Garthwaite then set up Assent. “You could say there was a common theme going on with my career then, the turnaround of distressed life and pension business.”

Working at Fund Partners, which is not a distressed business by any means, is likely to present different challenges. Fund Partners has already stated it has ambitious plans to grown. It bought International Financial Data Services’ authorised corporate director subsidiary in January last year.

IFDS carries out ACD functions for groups including Apollo Multi Asset Management, Argonaut Capital, Distinction Asset Management, Octopus Investments and Russell Investments.

Mr Garthwaite said: “Fund Partners is a small company looking to grow, and grow fast. That in itself is a big challenge and how we achieve it in a well-managed way, but not so fast that you lose control of your business, will be our mission.”

It is a mission, in regulatory terms, that Mr Garthwaite is more than prepared for. He expects the regulatory environment to get even tougher.

“There will be no let up. We have got huge challenges which are coming from Europe, forgetting even the UK regulators and what they may do. For fund managers there are changes such as MiFID and Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive to deal with.

“Regulation is not going to go away any time soon. Our industry has an appalling record of forgetting why it is there in the first place, which is for the end customer. There may be many external regulatory pressures but we must never forget that we are here for the clients.”

Samantha Downes is a freelance journalist

Career ladder:

October 2014 Chief executive Fund Partners

2010 – 2013 Chief risk officer and board director, Aegon UK

2008 – 2010 Chief executive and founder, Assent Financial

2003 – 2008 Group risk and compliance director, Resolution plc (previously Britannic plc)

2002 – 2003 Head of risk and change, Equitable Life

2001 – 2002 Co-founder, Globalegacy, a social venture capital enterprise

1989 – 2001 Price Waterhouse (and subsequently PwC) in London, Jersey and Sydney focused in on financial services providing risk management, corporate finance and outsourcing consulting.