Christiana Stewart-Lockhart
Christiana Stewart-Lockhart is the Director General of the Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA). She previously spent more than a decade working in Westminster including ten years at the Institute of Economic Affairs. She also founded EPICENTER, a Brussels based network of some of the most respected think tanks from across Europe. Christiana holds a BA in Politics from the University of York. She is a member of TISA’s Children’s Financial Education Policy Council and also sits on the Advisory Board for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship.
Daniel Rodwell - GrowthInvest
Daniel Rodwell (Managing Director)
Daniel was a founding investor in GrowthInvest and Chairman of the Investment Committee since 2012. He became Managing Director in late 2014. Prior to this he worked in finance for nearly 20 years, managing institutional and private funds focusing on equities and derivatives. Daniel managed the UK division of Van der Moolen Equities AG and more recently founded the equity derivatives boutique Ten Derivatives LLP.
GrowthInvest is a unique, independent platform which provides access to tax efficient investments to a growing network of UK financial advisers, wealth managers and investors. The Platform aims to bring the advantages of early stage investing to a wider audience of investors and advisers, who are in a position to benefit from the higher returns these companies potentially offer and tax efficiency via government sponsored schemes. The purpose-built technology allows clients to consolidate, control and enhance their investment portfolio within a single, secure online portal. Originally founded by financial advisers in 2012 as the Seed EIS Platform, the company rebranded as GrowthInvest in October 2016 in order to better reflect the wider range of products and services available.
David Brookes - BDO LLP
BDO LLP is the world’s fifth largest accountancy firm and has 15 offices in the UK with 220 partners and 3,000 staff. David is a tax partner heading up the firm’s specialist team advising on tax efficient investments and particularly the EIS and VCT schemes. David co-authored the Tolleys/Tottel book Venture Capital Taxes” and wrote the “Plus Markets (previously Ofex) Tax Guide”. David represents the CBI on the Tax Law Re-write project in relation to the EIS and VCT tax legislation. David’s clients include company’s raising finance (particularly those floating on AIM), individuals seeking to benefit from tax reliefs and investment banks and other product providers who are raising funds. David splits his time between BDO’s Reading and London offices.”
Dermot Campbell
Dermot Campbell’s career as a wealth management professional has spanned 23 years across a range of disciplines, including management, private banking, financial planning, product specialisation and as an independent financial adviser. The experience gained through high profile Directorships and management roles has given Dermot a wide ranging industry knowledge. Since 2012, Dermot was Chief Executive of Kuber Ventures Ltd, developing the business from its initial launch to the successful EIS investment platform that it is today. He stepped down in October 2019 but retains a Non-Executive Board position.
Kuber is the first digital platform in the tax efficient investment sector specifically designed to help Advisers advise their Clients on UK tax efficient products. It enables access to the market simply, efficiently, transparently and in a cost effective way. Through Kuber’s fully digitised offering, Advisers and their Clients can build diversified portfolios of EIS/SEIS and BR investments using the fully integrated digital illustration and application process. Advisers then benefit from a comprehensive level of client service and reporting through an investments entire life cycle. Kuber is changing the way the tax efficient investment market operates and is opening its products to a larger range of advisers and investors than ever before.
Gillian Roche-Saunders - Adempi Associates
Gillian is a regulatory consultant specialising in the venture finance sector. She works with EIS fund and portfolio managers as well as capital raisers, promoters, researchers and crowdfunding platforms.
Gillian is known for providing expert and pragmatic solutions to the industry. In addition to her experience working with many EISA members, she is an active advocate of EIS. Gillian chairs our regulatory committee and is a member of the EISA board.
Beyond EIS, Gillian also advises social impact investment firms, private equity firms and FinTech companies such as peer to peer lenders.
John Glencross - Calculus Capital Limited
John co-founded Calculus Capital with Susan McDonald in 1999, creating one of the UK’s most successful, independent private equity firms focused on investing in smaller, proven companies.
John has over 30 years’ experience in private equity, corporate finance, and operational management. During that time, he has invested in, advised on or negotiated more than 100 transactions and served on publicly quoted and private corporate boards.
Before co-founding Calculus Capital, John served as an Executive Director of European Corporate Finance for UBS for nine years where he advised on M&A, IPOs, restructurings and recapitalisations, strategic alliances and private equity. Prior to this, John was headhunted to be Head of the Mergers & Acquisitions Group of Philips and Drew, a 100 year old London based financial institution. At the start of his career, John qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Peat Marwick (subsequently KPMG), where he then went on to be recruited as a founder member of Deloitte’s newly established consultancy practice in the Gulf Region and then Corporate Finance practice in London.
John graduated from Oxford University with an MA (Hons) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Martin Fox - Bulletin Marketing
Martin Fox has been in financial services marketing all his working life. After a range of roles at Legal & General, he became Marketing Director at Prolific, and then General Manager Marketing at Pearl. He then took the opportunity to set up the strategic marketing arm of a London agency, where he launched ABN AMRO into the UK retail market, and launched Just Retirement from scratch. Today he runs Bulletin Marketing, and has a wide portfolio of financial services clients, across product providers, banks, investment houses, EIS managers, wealth managers, family offices and service providers. He is one of the judges of the Sustainable and Ethical Investment Awards run by Incisive Media, and he also chairs the judging committee of the EIS Association Awards. He is now also chair of the EISA Financial Planning Committee.
Bulletin Marketing are a specialist financial services marketing agency.
Based on decades of experience, we help companies become more profitable by:
– ensuring that they have a clear marketing strategy, that is created to support the plans of the business
– sharpening their proposition so that it is compelling for the target audiences
– agreeing who the target audiences really are
– finding the most effective ways to engage with the target audiences.
It is an approach that works. For some clients we even act as a part time marketing director.
And … we know the EIS marketplace very well!!
Martin Sherwood
A founder of EISA over 25 years ago and formerly Head of Tax Efficient Solutions at Smith & Williamson and Co-Principal of Enterprise Investment Partners, Martin has extensive experience of fund-raising and fund management in the tax-efficient market and is a long-standing champion of the EIS. He is also a highly experienced non executive director/chairman with over 30 years of board leadership experience across a broad range of sectors, including Renewable Energy, Leisure, Healthcare and Tech. He is Chairman of the Membership & Events Committee of EISA.
Philip Hare - Philip Hare & Associates
Philip Hare is a co founder of Philip Hare & Associates LLP, a tax consultancy business which specialises in the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), Seed EIS, Venture Capital Trust (VCT) and Social Investment Tax Relief (SITR). He and his team advise small and medium sized companies and their investors in respect of the tax relief available for investment and the conditions that need to be met by the company and the investor. They are in regular contact with specialists at HMRC discussing solutions to technical and administrative issues that arise from the schemes.
Philip is a Chartered Accountant and Chartered Tax Advisor. Whilst at PWC, EIS Association members voted his team the ‘EIS Tax Adviser of the year’ for eight years in a row and since setting up his own firm in 2015, Philip Hare & Associates LLP has won ‘SEIS/EIS Tax Adviser of the year’ for each of the last three years.
Stephen Geddes - Apex Group
Mainspring provides dependable, high quality fund services to EIS funds and small to medium sized private equity and venture capital managers in the UK. We are regulated to provide nominee and custodian services for EIS fund managers, and authorised to handle the cash and assets of EIS fund investors.
Our service is designed to grow with our client’s offering and adapt to their evolving requirements. We take care of the time-consuming administrative components of fund management and fit in with our client’s schedule to allow them to focus on their own growth. Our administration systems are built upon secure, resilient, industry leading infrastructure which is proven for managing and recording business and accounting transactions of funds and enables us to provide our clients and their investors with accurate, timely and well-presented information.
Tom Wilde - Shoosmiths
Tom is a partner in the tax department at Shoosmiths LLP and heads up the firm’s enterprise investment scheme and venture capital trusts practice. Tom is a Solicitor and Chartered Tax Adviser with extensive experience advising a wide range of investors and investee companies on structuring and implementing tax efficient investments, reorganisations and exits in compliance with the EIS and VCT regimes. Shoosmiths LLP is a major UK law firm with 10 offices across the UK and was named UK Law Firm of the Year at The British Legal Awards 2015.