The latest moves in wealth management from across Europe and the UK.

State Street Global Advisors
State Street Global Advisors has hired former BlackRock ESG specialist Carlo Funk to lead its ESG investment strategy for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Appointed earlier this month, Funk works alongside the investment research and management teams to design ESG solutions for advisors, consultants and institutional clients. The global asset manager has close to $2.8 trillion (£2.26 trillion) under management.

Before joining State Street, he led the design and distribution of passive ESG investments at BlackRock and was a sustainable investing sales specialist for the group across EMEA. Earlier in his career, he worked at JP Morgan Private Bank in New York and Frankfurt.

Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse has appointed James Mulford as head of UK advisory and sales. Mulford joins from UBS, where he was most recently head of global mandates and investment content for the wealth manager’s UK and Jersey business.

He held a number of senior discretionary and advisory management posts at UBS for more than a decade. Prior to that, he spent six years with Barclays Wealth.

Mulford will be in charge of driving the bank’s “investment competence” and will play a key role in “ensuring that clients benefit from a best-in-class advisory proposition,” it said. He starts in mid-September and will report to Credit Suisse UK CEO Christian Berchem.

River and Mercantile
River and Mercantile, the investment solutions and asset management business, has hired David Hanratty as its global head of distribution.

Hanratty is taking on this role from James Barham, the group chief executive, who carried it out as part of his previous responsibilities when he was deputy group CEO.

Hanratty will be responsible for the distribution teams across the business, which encompasses River and Mercantile Asset Management (UK, Global and Emerging Market Equities), River and Mercantile Solutions (Advisory and Fiduciary Management), River and Mercantile Derivatives (LDI and Structured Equity) and the River and Mercantile Macro Division. He will be based in London and report to Barham.

Prior to this, he was managing director at Pioneer Investments where, amongst a range of roles, he had direct responsibility for global distributors across the business. Previously he was sales and marketing director at Janus’s UK wealth operation. 

TOBAM
TOBAM, the Paris-based asset manager, has appointed Philippe Bigeard as head of business development for France, a new role for the firm.

Prior to this, Bigeard was at CACEIS for the past two years, where he served as group head of product marketing and was responsible for launching a new marketing function. Before that, he was business development director for seven years, overseeing the new businesses, and the client satisfaction and sales strategy for 100 French institutional clients and 60 non-resident asset managers.

Bigeard will lead a new business drive in TOBAM’s native France. French investors currently account for 5 per cent of TOBAM’s total AUM. TOBAM manages close to $9 billion (as of 30 June 2019) and is composed of 53 professionals in four offices. In 2018, the firm signed a distribution partnership with the distribution platform MyFunds Office, followed by the expansion of the Anti-Benchmark® Multi-Asset offering to IFAs and distributors in May 2019.

With more than 20 years’ experience, Bigeard also worked for a couple of years at Credit Agricole Indosuez Luxembourg in sales covering European asset managers, family offices and private banks.