Jo Welman had a career in the city spanning 35 years and worked in a wide variety of financial sectors.
After graduating from Exeter University in 1979 with a degree in economics, Jo spent ten years at Baring Asset Management where he managed a range of UK and US pension funds and unit trusts, investing across multiple sectors including bonds, international equities, commercial and residential property and private equity.
In 1989 Jo was recruited to become Managing Director of merchant bank Rea Brothers’ institutional and private wealth investment management division. Here he built on their sub scale funds management business and over the following decade launched a series of specialist investment trusts and funds in a variety of industry and property sectors, before forming a joint venture with reinsurance brokers Benfields (now Aon Benfield) and raising one of the first limited liability corporate capital vehicles for the Lloyds insurance market in 1993. Following the sale of Rea to Close Brothers in 1999 Jo became Chairman of Brit Insurance Holdings Plc., a company that he co-founded in 1995, and also served as non-executive director or chairman of several investment trusts and publicly listed and private companies.
In 2001 he founded a new private equity and specialist asset management firm, Epic Investment Partners (Epic). Epic was subsequently sold to AIM listed Syndicate Asset management in 2010 but the private equity division remained independent and Jo remains an advisor to the management team. Although now retired, Jo continues to chair an insurance company’s asset allocation and capital management process and provides corporate finance and investment advice to entrepreneurs and private investors.
Jo will be writing a regular column for The Sussex Newspaper.
