Diverse strategies, one trusted manager.

I usually say we're a multi-strategy investment firm that helps investors, advisers and institutions get to better outcomes through disciplined diversification. That's the one-line version. But the honest answer is that we're a group of people who've spent our careers obsessing over one question: how do you build portfolios that behave the way people actually need them to — over years, through cycles, not just in a good quarter?

The firm opened its doors in 2001. We launched as a multi-strategy manager, and our very first fund was a fund of hedge funds. So from day one the DNA of the business was about combining different sources of return rather than betting the house on a single view. That instinct — diversify, stay humble about what you can't predict — has never left us.

A few really matter. In 2006 we built Infostore — our own proprietary data, analytics and reporting platform. That sounds like plumbing, and it is, but it turned out to be one of the most important decisions the firm ever made. It meant our investment thinking and our client reporting were built on the same foundation, in-house, from very early on.

Then in 2015 we broadened out with a long-only range, which took us beyond alternatives into the mainstream unit trust space. In 2017 we launched the Corion Report, which has become one of the most widely read publications among financial advisers in the country. In 2019 we added local and global passive model portfolios to the discretionary fund management platform. Life-licence, endowment-wrapped portfolios followed in 2021, and in 2024 we launched a new CIS model portfolio range. So it's been a steady widening of the offering — but always around the same core.

My route in was slightly unusual. I started life as a private client portfolio manager, then moved into investment banking with Investec, where I spent years in equity derivatives and risk management — a lot of local and international experience in how markets really behave under stress. After that I co-founded a business called AG Capital. I joined Corion in 2012, and I've been leading the firm since.

That derivatives-and-risk background shapes how I think. When you've sat on a trading desk you learn very quickly that being right about direction isn't enough — position sizing, correlation, what happens when everything moves together, that's where portfolios are won or lost. I brought that mindset into a business that was already deeply thoughtful about diversification, and the two fit together well.

Because it changes the incentives. The people making the investment decisions and running the business are the same people who own it. There's no distant parent company, no quarterly pressure from a listed group pulling us off course. When an adviser trusts us with their clients' money, they're dealing with principals — not a rotating cast of employees managing to someone else's targets.

It also shows up in continuity. We're a team of sixteen investment professionals with more than 225 years of collective experience between us, and a lot of that experience has been built inside Corion over long tenures. My colleagues David Bacher, our Chief Investment Officer, Simon du Plooy, who leads portfolio engineering, and Anastasia Mahona, who runs our data and reporting — they've been here for well over a decade each. That kind of stability is rare, and advisers feel it.

Fair challenge. I'd frame it around what I call substance you can audit and service you can feel. We talk internally about six pillars, and they're not marketing — they're the things we'd point to if you asked us to prove it.

Depth of team, first: the sixteen professionals and the 225 combined years I mentioned. Second, investment performance — an award-winning track record spanning more than two decades, which very few independent houses can claim. Third, robust systems — Infostore, our tailored database, custom analytics and client portals, built and maintained in-house since 2006. Fourth, genuine international capability, including a Guernsey US-dollar-denominated fund and global manager research through partners such as bfinance. Fifth, a consistent, repeatable process — the same philosophy and the same strategic and tactical asset-allocation framework applied every time. And sixth, reporting and engagement: leading reporting packs, monthly commentary, the videos and the Corion Report. Keeping partners genuinely informed.

The systems, probably — because they quietly make the other five possible. Owning our own data and analytics platform means our research, our portfolio construction and our reporting all speak the same language. We're not stitching together three vendors' spreadsheets at month-end. It means we can answer an adviser's question about a portfolio quickly and accurately, and it means our engagement isn't a slide pack someone made once — it's live, it's consistent, and it's ours.

But I'd be careful about separating them. The point of the six pillars is that they reinforce each other. Deep team plus consistent process plus proprietary systems is what produces the track record and the reporting. Pull one out and the whole thing weakens.

It comes down to a handful of enduring principles. We believe long-term investing wins — investors are rewarded for taking measured risk over time, so strategic asset allocation is the foundation of every portfolio, with selective tactical opportunities layered on top. We believe agility creates opportunity, because markets change quickly and portfolios need to adapt without losing sight of their long-term objectives.

We believe market cycles create value — by focusing on valuations and fundamentals, we look for opportunities when assets are attractively priced. We believe diversification drives resilience, so we build in multiple sources of return across asset classes, regions, styles and strategies. And we believe cost matters — every decision has to justify its cost in terms of expected return or risk reduction. None of that is exotic. The discipline is in actually doing it, the same way, every time.

Very — and, crucially, it's repeatable. Every manager we look at travels the same documented path, from the first screen to the investment-committee decision. It starts with a high-level quantitative screen across the universe, then an introduction meeting, then detailed screening where we apply our proprietary scoring. From there it's full due diligence, then watch and bench lists where candidates are tracked before selection, and finally a buy-list decision confirmed by the investment committee.

The reason that matters is consistency. Because it's a defined process rather than one person's gut feel, we can explain exactly why a manager is in a portfolio and exactly what would take them out. Advisers value that enormously — it's the difference between "trust us" and "here's the evidence."

We engineer the whole portfolio, not a shelf of parts. That's a phrase we use deliberately. A client doesn't experience the individual building blocks — they experience one lived return. So Simon and the team start from a strategic asset allocation and then layer deliberate tilts onto it: regional tilts, style tilts, sector tilts, asset-class tilts. The client's outcome is the sum of all of that working together, and we design it that way from the outset rather than assembling a list of good funds and hoping they add up.

It's a discretionary fund management partnership for financial advisers. In plain terms: you keep the client relationship — which is yours and should stay yours — and we take on the heavy lifting of building, running and reporting on the investment portfolios, under an agreed mandate. Open architecture, proprietary systems, and a documented, repeatable process, engineered around your practice and your clients.

The tagline we use for the DFM is simplicity, agility and engagement, and those aren't just words on a wall. Simplicity, because we take genuine complexity off the adviser's desk. Agility, because we can move when markets do. Engagement, because we keep advisers and their clients properly informed rather than leaving them guessing.

It means one platform, every vehicle — and no obligation to use our own products. The platform spans passive and active, local and global, traditional and alternative. Practically, that's domestic passive model portfolios and global US-dollar passive models, both running since 2019; our CIS model portfolios that blend active and passive across the full risk spectrum, launched in 2024; our long-only funds — Income, Stable, Growth and Equity; a life-licence range of endowment-wrapped portfolios from 2021; and our award-winning retail hedge funds with a twenty-year-plus track record.

The important part is the "open." An adviser can access all of that, but the use of Corion's own funds is strictly opt-in. We're never forcing our products into a client's portfolio to suit us. If the best building block for a mandate is somebody else's, that's what goes in.

Head-on, because it's exactly the right thing to be nervous about. Our whole governance model is built to make sure there are no unexpected outcomes — only well-managed decisions, communicated clearly. We're a Category I, II and IIA licensed financial services provider, independently audited by a leading global firm, with independent external compliance oversight, and we hold regular joint investment and portfolio-construction meetings with our partners so nothing happens in a black box.

On conflicts specifically: use of our own funds is opt-in, as I said; underlying manager arrangements are fully transparent; any joint ventures are disclosed up front; and we keep external agreements minimal and declared. We'd rather over-disclose than have an adviser discover something later. Trust is the entire product here.

Painless, by design — and I say that proudly. It's a bilateral 90-day written notice to terminate. No exit penalties, no lock-ups, no deferred arrangements. Full portability of all reporting and historical data, and hands-on transition support if you need it. If a partner ever decides to leave, we want that to be clean and dignified.

Honestly, that's a competitive statement as much as an ethical one. If you know you can walk away easily, you stay because the work is good — not because you're trapped. That keeps us honest and it keeps us sharp.

Infostore is the engine, but advisers experience it through a few things. There's Elevate, an adviser portal built specifically to enhance our partners' practices. There's Corion Spice, which does portfolio analytics, attribution and what-if scenario modelling — so an adviser can genuinely interrogate a portfolio, not just receive a statement. There's branded report and presentation automation at scale, so client packs go out looking professional and consistent without anyone burning a weekend on them. And there's a risk dashboard doing daily risk, liquidity and mandate-compliance monitoring in the background.

The theme across all of it is giving advisers institutional-grade tooling that would be completely uneconomic for a single practice to build. That's the leverage in partnering with us.

I'd say: come and test us. Ask us the hard questions — about performance, about process, about how we'd handle your specific book of clients. Because everything I've described is meant to be checked, not taken on faith. That's the whole point of building the systems, documenting the process and keeping the governance tight.

We exist to simplify the world of investing, to build agile solutions, and to keep our partners genuinely engaged and informed about their money. If that's the kind of partner you're looking for, the conversation is easy to start — and, as I said, just as easy to end. We're comfortable being judged on the work.