Former Fisher Funds head of fixed income, David McLeish, is set to re-emerge with a new venture dubbed Wedge Management.
Wedge joined the Financial Service Providers Register last month as a wholesale managed investment scheme with the business likely to centre on a fixed interest offering.
McLeish established Papakura Capital in May this year (changing the name to Wedge last week) prior to his exit from Fisher this August after 13 years at the firm.
He owns about 80 per cent of Wedge with other minority shareholders including former Fisher colleagues Lyle McNee and Angela Quirk.
McNee served as a senior fixed income analyst at Fisher for more than 11 years, ending his tenure this September.
Also a one-time member of the Fisher fixed income team before a promotion to head of trading and portfolio management in 2015, Quirk left the roughly $26 billion fund manager in August.
Her departure is understood to be unrelated to a wider shake-up in the Fisher Funds executive team, now headed by Simon Power, carried out about the same time.
Also last week, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) named Kari Jones as executive director for transformation and operational delivery.
Currently Te Whatu Ora (Health NZ) chief data officer, Jones starts at the regulator in November, replacing Sharon Thompson who left the top-table FMA gig just 20 months into the job.
Thompson took over as Worksafe NZ chief last month. She previously held senior roles at the Inland Revenue Department, ASB and Westpac.
Before taking on the health department position last October, Jones worked for Woolworths, NZ Post, Air NZ and NZME, leading data and analytics teams.
She also spent more than four years in management consulting for PwC in NZ.
Meanwhile, the NZ Superannuation Fund (NZS) is on the hunt for a new investment operations manager.
In a just-posted recruitment ad, the sovereign wealth fund says the administration “team is evolving to better meet stakeholder needs and achieve greater scalability”.
“Our goal is to simplify how we work and develop deeper specialist knowledge within our people,” the NZS says. “We are doing this by transitioning from a team of generalists to three specialised kapa within Investment Operations, each responsible for a distinct area of the team’s overall accountabilities.
“… The manager role is crucial in guiding the team through this transition and in leading and owning a specific area of responsibility within Investment Operations.”
NZS has almost $80 billion under management, invested across a diverse range of in-house and external investment strategies.