Interviews  >  Connie Helyar-Wilkinson: Out of the ordinary

From owning a milk round to founding one of the most successful fund administration companies in the Channel Islands, Connie Helyar-Wilkinson is unconventional to say the least. Nick Kirby catches up with the first Chair of the Guernsey NED Forum

Guernsey-born Connie Helyar-Wilkinson is best known in the Channel Islands for launching her own fund administration company, Ipes, in 1998. It was a firm that she successfully sold in 2008 in a management buyout to RJD Capital. While this is arguably the most notable part of her career to date, the route to success was far from conventional, particularly in its early stages.

From buying a piece of land with her first husband, when she was only 18 – and building a house on it, which she still owns – a career in banking was originally passed over for a decade of entrepreneurship. Having returned to banking in the 1980s, she ultimately created her own success.

Since the sale of Ipes, Connie has assumed a number of NED positions, as well as becoming the first Chair of the Guernsey NED Forum, offering a voice for NEDs in the island's finance industry. She is also a Jurat – the highest honour that Guernsey can confer on a resident of the island. She took time to run businesslife.co through her past, present and future.

When you started your working life, the finance industry in Guernsey was in its infancy. Was it even a real career option back then?
In truth, finance as we know it hadn't happened at all. When I left school I joined a bank, but I was married at 18 and had my son when I was 20. In those days, that was pretty much the way things were – you left school, you got a job then got married and had kids. There were no real aspirations.

You may have joined a bank, but the road to Ipes was quite circuitous.
That's true! I worked in a bank for a couple of years, had a baby, then went back to the bank part-time. But I'm pretty independent and I wanted to do something different, so I left and bought a milk round! I did that for two years, before selling it for twice the price. From there I started an art shop, which I had for 10 years before selling it quite successfully to the Lexicon department store. I then invested the proceeds in a house in Spain.

It was in the early Eighties, however, that I realised the only real potential here in Guernsey was in the finance industry, which was taking off at the time. There wasn't a lot to choose from business-wise if you weren't a grower or didn't have a hotel. The onset of the finance industry and the way in which it started to grow appealed to me.

It can't have been easy giving up your independence to go back into full-time work.
It wasn't easy at all. I had to really discipline myself to become a student again, and also to comply with the strict rules of banking. But it was my way of getting back into the mainstream and building a career.

That said, I wasn't in traditional banking for very long. After a couple of years I moved into the NatWest trust company. And then I moved into securities and was effectively dealing stocks and shares for clients and for the bank itself. I moved towards investment management with Leopold Joseph, and then – rather by accident than design – I ended up working for Guernsey International Fund Managers, heading up their private equity and fund admin business. Little did they know at the time this was an up-and-coming area.

Cutting a long story short, circumstances changed and I decided to move on. However, within two weeks of my leaving, one of the clients said, ‘This won't do, we don't want you to leave'. Basically they persuaded me to set up on my own with my co-founder and partner, Peter Gillson, and so Ipes was born.

When you set up Ipes you were a woman operating in a niche market. How difficult was that on top of just establishing your own business?
I don't think being female came into it – I knew my subject and that's what mattered. No matter what you're doing, you have to prove yourself. It didn't happen overnight – to start with there was Peter, myself and four others, but we very soon started to grow. Our biggest breakthrough was that we'd worked with London lawyers putting structures together, and early on they started to give us all the pitches that were coming forward. We had first-mover advantage.

So, you started in 1998 with six people, and when Ipes was sold in 2008 there were £36bn of funds under management – could you ever have imagined that?
No, we never imagined it would get that big, and in fact Peter didn't enjoy it when it got bigger – he retired two years before it was sold. It's a completely different thing running a company of that size. Of course we were absolutely delighted that it happened – I have always been an entrepreneur at heart. I love being my own boss and I'd do it again if I were younger!

So what happened once it was sold in 2008?
I stayed on as a consultant for a year, but it didn't really work out. I think the new MD couldn't get his feet under the table while I was still there. After a year I pretty much phased myself out, and that year I was asked to be a Jurat, which was something completely different to what I had been doing. And, of course, there was my NED work.

Talking of NEDs, you're Chair of the Guernsey NED Forum, which was launched in February this year and is aimed at the finance sector. What's the thinking behind that?
Tina Torode of Optimus Group is really the one who should take all the credit for this. In her previous role, she used to organise a lot of events for NEDs and she realised – and I agree with her 100 per cent – that they were playing a very valuable role but had no real representation in their own right. This meant, for instance, that they couldn't comment on any consultation document. Also the Guernsey Financial Services Commission was trying to encourage NEDs to get incorporated so they had a dialogue in their own right with the Commission. There was a group of people who regularly attended the sessions that Tina had organised and she asked me if I'd be interested in getting involved.

You and Tina are the only two women on the Forum board, and it's a constant complaint in the islands that women are under-represented at board level and in politics. You're a supporter of the Women's Development Forum in Guernsey, so I'm guessing this is a matter that is close to your heart.
Indeed it is. We're the only two women on the committee at the moment, but there are going to be annual elections and we're encouraging women to join. I think there are several reasons why women aren't well represented in politics and on boards. Sometimes women don't give themselves enough credit. Also it's time consuming and women tend to have families to look after and will probably put them first. So there's always going to be a gender issue for that reason.

However, I think the general attitude to gender in Guernsey has changed in recent years. There are a lot of women in their thirties and early forties who occupy relatively senior positions in our industry – you wouldn't have seen that 20 years ago. As for politics – well, I think a lot of that has to do with the way government is structured in Guernsey. It's very frustrating to try and get things through, and women have been put off by that. There are fewer women in politics now than before – they just don't see it as a relevant career. It also requires a certain mentality and a number of women don't feel strongly enough about it, so why put themselves through it?

What drove you to be a Jurat?
It's a great honour. I was flattered to be asked and honoured to be able to give something back to my island, as I've been very lucky. I also wanted to do something different, and being part of the judicial system is different to anything I'd done before.

You're on the board of a clean-tech fund manager – is economic diversification the key to the future success of the Channel Islands?
I think we have to plan ahead, and economic diversification is an important part of that. Channel Islanders have always been very good at diversifying – when one of our industries fades away we find another one, and I think that still can happen. But you can't be complacent and not work towards it.

So what's next for Connie Helyar-Wilkinson?
Well I'm a commissioner of the Arts Commission – we are just setting up a Guild, so that is something I am involved with at the moment. I have property I rent out. I'm always redesigning things. I have a chalet business in France. So there is quite a lot to do, and that's all on top of the NED stuff and other things we've spoken about. And between my husband Charles and myself we have 10 grandchildren and step grandchildren – so I'm kept very busy as you can imagine! 

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