My approach is to keep it simple and understandable

Sue Round, director of group investments and manager of the Amity UK fund at Ecclesiastical Investment Management, has recently passed this milestone.

Considering her original plan was to be a fashion buyer, Ms Round admits her successful investment career, spent largely at Ecclesiastical, has been a bit of a surprise.

“I didn’t even know what a fund manager was,” she says. “I came into the city in 1979 and I didn’t really understand what was going on.

“I’d started to work for an investment trust management group. I came in as a junior analyst, with no experience at all. It was on-the-job learning and working with a very small team. There were only six of us, covering all the asset types.

“But I didn’t really understand some of the key things that were happening. It was a year of a lot of change, so it was quite a lively market – and a real baptism of fire.”

She smiles as she recalls her first job, where one computer was shared by six people and companies were analysed based on Extel Cards – the first corporate snapshots, which contained brief data on profit and loss.

“One of my jobs was to take these and file them, and keep the ones we had investments in and do up-to-date analysis,” she says. “It was a completely different role, and I thought at the time it seemed very exciting, and maybe one day I’d be able to manage funds of my own.”

She didn’t come into the City with any pre-conceived notions, as her background was in retail – she worked for a firm that is now part of House of Fraser, where she managed a team of people as an assistant buyer, a role that sounds like something out of Are You Being Served?.

“It really was,” she laughs. “[As] assistant buyer, I worked for the buyer and looked after all the admin. But it was such a ‘dead man’s shoes’ environment – people tended to stay forever. I got fed up with that, and it was very low pay, which was why I looked for something completely different.”

She describes her journey from analyst to fund manager as “slow”, having spent five years with investment trust firm Philip Hill before moving to Ecclesiastical.

“It was a period of consolidation in the [investment trust] sector, and that affected some of our funds. We lost about half through takeovers, which slimmed down the operation completely,” she says. “At that point, I knew I was going to be made redundant, so I started looking around for another job and came across Ecclesiastical, who were looking for an analyst.”

The move signalled the start of a career that has included a rise from analyst to fund manager to director of group investments and will see her celebrate 30 years at the firm next year.

“I’ve been knocking around here for roughly 29 years, which is unusual, but our team has a very long record,” she says. “You could argue you get stale, but equally there is consistency. Our performance has been very good, and I think part of that is driven by our long-term horizons. You take a position and you stick with it, you ride out some of that volatility. But if you compare that with others it is quite hard, because the fund managers have changed or the funds have changed shape.

“My approach is to keep it simple and understandable. If you can explain why you do things and people really get it, they stick with us for the long term.”

Although the team at Ecclesiastical when she joined was smaller than at Philip Hill, she was expected to manage funds as well as do research. But investment trusts continued to be a theme in her new role, with the company eventually increasing ownership in the St Andrew investment trust that later formed the basis for the company’s Oeic fund range.

As the investment was brought in-house, the team launched three pooled vehicles in 1999 in a second tranche of funds, following the launch of the Amity UK fund in 1988. Ms Round has managed the £98.73m Amity UK fund since launch, when it was formed in response to the company’s traditional church customer base at a time when there were few ethical funds.

“One of the things we did was to try and not just make it a negative screen. Ethical funds then were deemed to be pretty dreadful and only for cranks – it was called ‘the Brazil fund’ because only nutty people would invest in it,” she laughs.

Socially responsible investing has since become more of a mainstream pursuit. Ms Round prefers the term ‘responsible’ investing – “it’s a better word than ethical” – and claims as a responsible investor you have stewardship responsibilities from a corporate governance point of view, but also want to be seen to be actively monitoring the risks companies take as part of their normal business.

She adds: “It’s not just looking at things on a straightforward, black-and-white negative screen basis, but actually bringing in the more positive aspects. We have a much more developed positive screen, with nine pillars of things that we look for.

“We are not going to ever be what I would call a typical mainstream investment house. For our size and our experience, we need to be focused on something we do well, and we do the ethical very well. So stick with the knitting, do what you do well and roll it out across your new funds.”

One of her highlights in her tenure at Ecclesiastical was her work in 2007 in persuading the board to “buy into the idea of extending the responsible investment approach across all the funds and really [focus] on growing the business”.

“For many years, we managed the in-house funds, and we had a bit of money from private investors, but we didn’t really have ourselves in a position to grow the business,” she explains. “So getting them to buy into that was a really important moment for me; by then, I was quite convinced that, in spite of the ups and downs, the responsible market was, and is, a growth area.

“It changed my focus as well, because I’m building a business now rather than just relying on the business to generate cashflow. Building a team and making sure we have the right distribution networks has expanded my remit quite dramatically. It is a side that I’ve found very enjoyable, and it has been very successful.”

Success in her professional life has also filtered into her hobbies, which include gardening, refurbishing properties – both in the UK and in Turkey – and collecting vintage china.

“I get a lot of pleasure out of seeing a wreck restored, either to its former glory or just brought up to speed. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty – I never have. I’m also interested in antiques. I’ve been a collector of vintage china for a long, long time. We’re developing a vintage shop near our house in Turkey that will be run by my husband and is basically built on my collection,” she laughs.

But while she argues it is important to have interests outside of work, she admits she can’t help bringing a financial aspect to her hobbies.

“If it’s a project, I look at how we manage it, the cost, et cetera. You bring a different skill, and there is something important, I think, in engaging people who are on the ground doing things,” she says. “When you’re sitting in the City, you become completely disassociated with building and construction – making something, being creative and having an end result. It is very easy to look at company accounts and draw assumptions. But it’s not the man on the street, and they’re the specialist craftsman: you learn a lot from them.

“Some of the people I’ve had working for me in the past have been missold all sorts of products and have no idea how to sort it out. When you start to hear those stories repeating themselves, you think there is a big gap in what we think as a financial services industry and about the man in the street, which partly colours my thinking about keeping things simple.”