The UK Infrastructure Bank appoints its first permanent executive team

Following a competitive process, the UK Infrastructure Bank has announced the appointment of five founding members of its Executive team, as permanent recruitment to the Bank now accelerates.

As a result of these hires, the founding Executive Committee of the Bank will be gender balanced, with a mix of public and private sector backgrounds and relevant international experience. The group have collectively worked at similar national organisations such as the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, Green Investment Bank and UK Export Finance, as well as leading financial services firms and central government departments. 

Expected to arrive during the summer 2022 and be based at the Bank’s Leeds headquarters, the Bank is preparing to welcome:

• Head of Banking: Ian Brown 
• Chief Finance Officer: Annie Ropar 
• Chief Risk Officer: Peter Knott 
• Chief People Officer: Patricia Galloway 
• General Counsel: Davinder Mann

They will join the existing team who are: John Flint (Chief Executive), David Lunn (Chief Operating Officer), Kate McGavin and Helen Williams (Job-share Policy Director), Urvashi Parashar (Chief Impact Officer and Chief Economist) and Stuart Nivison (Head of Portfolio Management). As CFO, Annie Ropar will also sit on the Board.

On the new appointments, John Flint, CEO of the UK Infrastructure Bank said:

“I am delighted to welcome Ian, Annie, Peter, Patricia and Davinder to the Bank. This is an outstanding executive team who will take the Bank to its maturity, and I am proud of the depth of talent that we have attracted."

“We’re diverse by design at the UK Infrastructure Bank and this team will set the tone as we grow the whole organisation and deliver on our urgent mission to tackle climate change and boost local and regional economic growth across the country.”

The UK Infrastructure Bank was opened in June 2021 in interim form and in less than a year it has closed seven deals across its core priority sectors with the private and public sector. As it begins to scale up and move beyond its interim phase, it will now recruit permanent teams across all of its functions, aiming to attract diverse talent from across the public and private sector to its headquarters in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Its unique business model offers employees the opportunity to have a real influence on the Bank’s direction as it delivers on its mission.

The appointment of this permanent executive team comes at an important time for the Bank, as it prepares to launch its first strategy later this month which will set out how it will deliver its mission to help tackle climate change and support regional and local economic growth.

UK Infrastructure Bank executive team

Head of Banking: Ian Brown

Ian Brown is an experienced senior banker, who will be leaving LGPS Central, the pooled local government pension investment manager, where he is Head of Private Markets, to become the UK Infrastructure Bank’s Head of Banking. He joined LGPS Central in 2020 to build their infrastructure, private credit, private equity and real estate direct and fund of funds offering for their eight UK pension schemes. Previously, he spent 14 years at Lloyds Banking Group, where latterly he was Head of Industrials & Infrastructure and Head of Large Corporates, Europe. He had joined LBG to lead leveraged finance in Europe, becoming Global Head of Loan Financing before moving to head coverage. His career prior to LBG was at UBS (heritage Warburg) where he was a European leader within Leveraged Finance. His initial career was with Barclays, Barings and ANZ Merchant Bank. Outside of work, he is a Trustee and Chair of Finance for Rusthall Lodge Housing Association, a not-for-profit care home business. He was also until recently a mentor within the upReach financial careers programme for disadvantaged students.

Chief Finance Officer: Annie Ropar

Annie helped build a very similar government owned entity between 2018 and 2021 in Canada giving her an intimate understanding of what the CFO role at UKIB entails. She joined Canada Infrastructure Bank as employee no.2 which was established to deploy C$35 billion of authorized capital and grew to 80 staff members during her tenure there. She was responsible for establishing finance, risk management, legal and operational processes in enabling investment activities. Annie has the requisite blend of private and public sector exposure and has accrued an understanding of the dynamic and governance between the department/bureaucracy side of government vs. the political/policy side in the parliamentary system. She has crucial experience managing the entire balance sheet of a bank and scaling business at pace. Crucially, she also has a record in building world-class reporting and control functions. She had nine successful years with Royal Bank of Canada in their finance, private equity and institutional trading businesses, and 5 years with Aequitas NEO Exchange Inc, a start-up trading platform launched in 2015 to compete with the effective market monopoly held by Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).  She is a Deloitte-trained accountant and has sat on a number of boards (public and private), alongside being an active ambassador for diversity.

Chief Risk Officer: Peter Knott

Peter is highly experienced in impact investing and is currently Managing Director and Head of Portfolio Management at the Green Investment Group, part of Macquarie, and is based in Edinburgh.  He was previously Chief Risk Officer and then Chief Financial Officer of the UK Green Investment Bank, which he joined at its launch in 2012, and scaled to a global business with 500 employees now under Macquarie’s ownership. Peter has been involved in the acquisition and execution of over 150 infrastructure projects over the past decade across equity and debt. He was previously Group Head of Operational Risk at Standard Chartered Bank and has broader investment experience through positions with JP Morgan Chase and Robert Fleming. He is a Non-Executive Director and Audit Committee Chair at the Scottish National Investment Bank.

Chief People Officer: Patricia Galloway

Patricia Galloway is an experienced HR professional who after a successful career with DVB Bank SE will join the UK Infrastructure Bank as the Chief People Officer. Patricia joined DVB Bank in 2002 and as a member of the leadership team drove a significant scale up of the UK, Tokyo, and New York operations to create a global presence. At DVB Bank, Patricia designed the UK HR strategy, embedded a collaborative culture, and designed attractive career development propositions for employees within the organization. She held the Significant Influence Function CF29 position with the FCA and was a Chair of the Governance Committee for London.  Prior to joining DVB Bank, Patricia was the Head of HR for Forrester Research UK, working with the founders of a start-up acquired by Forrester to rapidly scale the company, growing the UK leadership team and the wider company employee services & capabilities. Patricia is Vice President and Board member of the City Women’s Network where she is a strong advocate of the inclusion and belonging agenda to support women in business. She is also a Non-Executive Director at the Association of Foreign Banks where she Chaired the HR committee for over ten years.

General Counsel: Davinder Mann

Davinder Mann is a city trained project finance lawyer who moved in-house into a technical advisory role at UK Export Finance. She went on to become the first General Counsel appointed in-house and modernized the provision of the legal service. She then progressed to Director of Legal & Compliance, creating a financial crime compliance function from the ground up. In recognition of her grasp on strategic priorities, she was asked to set up a new central directorate for UK Export Finance as Director of Strategy, Policy & Climate Change. She is an experienced General Counsel who has provided and overseen complex advice on transactions, compliance, and public law matters. She has strong relationships across Whitehall and with external industry and institutional stakeholders such as the big banks, UK Finance and the British Exporters Association. She also has over a year of experience as a trainee NED on the board of Ordnance Survey.

 

Further Information

• The UK Infrastructure Bank was announced as part of the Government’s National Infrastructure Strategy in 2020 and launched in June 2021. The Bank’s objectives are to help tackle climate change and to support regional and local economic growth. In January 2022 it published a discussion paper which set out early thinking as the Bank develops its Strategic Plan, to be published later in June 2022. More detail is available in the Policy Design Document and Framework Document published by Treasury; both of which are on our website.
• The Bank is operationally independent from Government. Projects are assessed by the Bank and approved through an Investment Committee.