About Murano.

My great, great grandparents were Norwegian immigrants from Rollag, Norway. My grandparents left South Dakota for New Mexico after WWII. As a young veterinarian, the only job my grandfather could find was working as an agricultural veterinarian in rural New Mexico. He took his wife in a Model-T with $25 dollars to get there. He lost his wallet in Oklahoma and had to ask his dad for a loan to make the trip. 25 years later, he made good after lots of hard work. He was honest, friendly, and ultimately successful. He is my role model. I was able to rise through the ranks fairly quickly, having started in 1996 as a Runner for Dean Witter on the bond floor of the CBOT to working on the Systematic Desk at Carr Futures (now NewEdge). At that point, I decided to do my MBA at HEC Paris in 1999. Unfortunately, every time I do a degree there is a recession or something bad going on and December 2001 was no exception. Fortunately, I was able to find a fund management position at Societe Generale managing credit and credit derivatives. After about 3 years, Nordea was looking to enter into hedge funds and I was hired as one of the key people to start the platform in Luxembourg; later I was managing the platform. 2008 changed the lives of many people, including mine. At the time I was looking to launch an Event Driven Long Volatility fund and was stopped dead in my tracks by the crisis. Hindsight being 20/20, it was probably the best thing that happened to me. At the time, the world really didn’t need Ole Rollag as a fund manager. However, there was a need for management consulting in asset management. As a consequence, I set up Perfecta Partners. I was very nervous about setting up Perfecta Partners in 2009 after having worked for big banks for nearly all of my career. But with a lot of work, it became profitable fairly quickly. Murano was a concept that was so unique, we spun it out of Perfecta in 2011. Working in a small business is intimidating. It feels like the training wheels are off! However, I am amazed how supportive everyone is. What I love about this industry is how nearly all of it is small business, even working with the largest companies in the industry we find that there is an enterprising mentality and lots of mutual support and sympathy. Not only that, but I am privileged to work with some very smart, capable and enterprising colleagues that share in the excitement of seeing something grow… from nothing.

Joining Murano at its inception in 2011, I have worked across both the research and business development arms of the firm. It is nostalgic to think back to the early days of the company, where just four of us were crammed into a tiny office, working to create and build something a bit different, and something that would be useful and valuable for our first handful of clients. We have come a long way as a firm, having now worked with a few hundred different asset managers globally, spanning all asset classes, as well as having spoken with many thousands of institutional investors, and counting. Over the years we have worked hard to constantly make enhancements and improvements to our service offering, while maintaining the same simple yet unique model that fills a gap that we saw in the market. Murano has grown, but we will never be a huge firm, so the value each employee can bring is immeasurable. Our ethos has always been rooted in empathy with both the investor and the fund manager, we need to be helpful to both for this to work. My focus at Murano has been to grow our client base sustainably and we take pride in the calibre of our clients. We have always sought to build long term relationships and it never fails to amaze me how small this industry can be sometimes. As the core business has matured, it is these relationships and the many lessons we have learned through years of speaking with the industry on such a large scale, while watching funds succeed and others fail, that led us to launch Murano Consulting.

“Education got me out of poverty and that is why we sent you to that school!”, is how my grandfather, a WWII veteran from the highlands of Scotland, scolded me when I complained about boarding school. I was 7 years old when I got a scholarship to a boarding school nearby and that is where I grew up. It was an upbringing which is thought of as archaic nowadays but what it taught me was self-reliance and independence. At 18 years’ old I signed up to teach English in Japan for a year being paid just food and board and the experience of working in rural Japan. I learnt conversational Japanese and this prompted me to change my undergraduate degree to East Asian Studies, a course with which I spent a year studying in Nanjing, China, where I then learnt conversational Mandarin. I completed my studies with a masters’ in Management and Finance and knew I wanted to be in the most fast-paced, international industry available. In 2008 I joined Macquarie Securities in London to broke Japanese equities but when the collapse of Lehman Brothers’ changed the industry I was offered a contract in the Singapore office to muck in as the equity department’s coffee boy. I was the MD’s dogsbody, preparing presentations about the Singapore business, sitting with the sales traders, taking notes for the brokers and doing all the work no-one else wanted to do on the equity sales desk. It was an experience I would not have gained in a permanent role. Finally, I moved into Macquarie’s research department to crunch numbers for the regional economist and equity analysts and this is where I got my first taste of analysis and writing reports. I subsequently secured a position in Aberdeen Asset Management’s Singapore office where I was a generalist analyst on the pan-Asian equity research desk. I spent the majority of my time researching public companies across ASEAN and Japan and ended up co-managing the Indonesia country funds and finally the Asia-Including Japan regional funds. I had always wanted run my own business so I left Aberdeen to do so and set up a company in Singapore in which we analysed clients’ businesses, their target markets and helped clients to raise capital by originating mezzanine financing. After 3 good years we decided to close our doors after a sudden change in regulations. It was the most difficult decision I have ever had to make but it was the right one. After more than 10 years in fund management and asset raising in Singapore I decided I would move back to the U.K. if I could find the right role. As Head of Research at Murano I work with a talented team in a business which is going from strength to strength, work with clients who are industry veterans and utilise all my career experience to date.

Growing up in Scotland in a small coastal town, and being naturally very competitive, I fell in love with playing sport from a very young age. The values that embody being part of a team; commitment, work ethic and humility, all resonate strongly with me. These are principles that I hold dear in my day-to-day life. Playing sports also led me to meet people from all walks of life, helping me understand how to build relationships and be personable in any scenario. Graduating from University with a degree in Business & Economics gave me a foundation towards understanding the financial markets and their wider impact on society. This motivated me to find a place in the industry where I can use my interpersonal skills and my passion for making connections with people. At Murano, I have worked my way up through the Analyst program. Speaking to such a wide range of institutional investors and investment managers on a daily basis and really getting to grips with what they are each looking to achieve is fascinating. In my role as Senior Associate, I work closely with our Head of Research to coordinate the efforts across the research team as a whole. We work collectively to maintain a high level of service for our clients, while also providing investors with a friendly and useful tool to help them source new managers.

I believe that every moment counts, and every single person matters and can make a difference. My parents escaped communism in Eastern Europe and while I spent the majority of my early life growing up in the deep South, culturally I was raised Italian. Nowadays, having worked in this city for many years, I am proud to consider myself a true New Yorker. Diversity is in my blood. Somehow I missed the computer science/engineer gene that most of my family possess, but I was always a good problem solver, and have always enjoyed meeting new people. While I was in an asset raising role at an FX focused CTA, I spoke to lots of different investors and tried a multitude of different routes and methods to identify and connect with new contacts. When I became a Murano client and started using the service, I suddenly became aware that there was a better way. I joined Murano in 2018 to focus on building out our US manager base. This role allows me to follow my passion in connecting the right people with the right product. I am fortunate enough to hear first hand from a huge variety of different managers, what makes them tick, and what makes them unique. I am humbled to be a part of the Murano team and contribute to our exponential growth.

My family and I moved to Australia after the Yugoslavian war and I grew up watching my parents work hard to enable a better life for myself and my sister. I always maintained a strong connection to Europe and so after I graduated I decided to travel here for a one-year working holiday. Needless to say, and much to my mother’s dismay, I never left. I began my career in London at a large global oil company. Preferring a smaller company dynamic, I wanted to gain more exposure to how businesses are run and managed. Murano was developing and fast growing out of its start-up phase and so I came on board to focus on internal recruitment and finance. I also work to ensure the office in general runs smoothly. A few years on, I have witnessed the company reach a number of important milestones. We operate a unique business model for this industry and we maintain a clear trajectory for continued growth in the years to come, so I am excited to continue to play my part.

Having been born and raised in Switzerland, I made the best choice to move to England in 2009 to study English. While studying I was working part time as a Barista in Costa Coffee, often a very fast paced environment which required a high level of customer service. I've always been good with numbers, so honing in on my passion for data processing, I joined Murano in 2016 to help manage and process all the investor data being gathered by the research team. I began as a trainee Data Analyst and today I am proud to be Chief Data Analyst for the firm. I am in charge of making sure our investor intelligence is stored correctly and can be interpreted in different ways that are relevant for our clients. This includes ensuring our internal CRM system is used and updated consistently, as well as managing our client monitoring statistics and all performance metrics. As Murano has grown over the years, it is amazing to see how much our data sets have grown with it. I like to interpret data in a way that non-technical audiences would understand and it is exciting to be able to show the power of our data sets, which I appreciate are unique within this industry. I am excited to see how we can harness our investor intelligence as we continue to develop the business.