Specialist Investments

Braam Van Heerden

Braam is a Chartered Accountant with 25 years of financial markets experience. He began work with derivatives in 1996 as CFO for the Equities Trading Division at Rand Merchant Bank and was later asked to head up the Equities Structuring Division. In July 2006 he became joint head of Equities with specific responsibility for stockbroking, derivatives, structuring, securities lending and alternative investments divisions. In 2009, Braam joined Liberty / Stanlib to create a Beta investment business in the form of an ETF platform.  He was part of the founding team that built Truffle Asset Management where he was responsible for special projects and structuring. Braam joined Investec in August 2016 and is responsible for marketing and, with Glen Copans, fund management for the business.

Glen Copans

Glen is a Chartered Financial Analyst with 18 years’ experience in financial services. He joined Investec in February 2016 and became involved in building the Investec Specialist Investments business. Initially Glen played the role of Chief Operating Officer before handing this over and taking on fund management responsibilities. Previously, he worked at Momentum Asset Management (Pty) Ltd (RMB Asset Management) where he had various roles within the investment team and on the executive committee. He was a portfolio manager in the alternative investments team responsible for guaranteed products, equity hedge funds, absolute return funds and index funds. Glen oversaw research, structuring and implementation of all derivatives for the asset manager. In 2012 he was appointed Chief Operating Officer of Momentum Asset Management and in 2014 was involved in the launch of their passive business focusing on Beta and Smart Beta offerings to the retail and institutional markets.

Ruth Forssman

Ruth joined Investec Specialist Investments in 2017 and is currently designated Chief Operating Officer for both the CISCA Management Company and FAIS Fund Management entities where she is responsible for all operational aspects of the business.  She also serves as a non-executive director of the JSE broker Investec Markets Limited. 

Ruth’s fifteen years of financial markets experience includes equity derivatives trading and structuring, client management in the prime broking space, compliance (AML, FAIS, CISCA) and financial technology consulting.  Her initial term with Investec Bank was for four years on the equity derivatives desk involving trading, deal structuring, and management of a leveraged fund of hedge funds products. She furthered her interest in hedge funds in a client-focused role and later led teams in the Prime Services context with two leading prime broking businesses for seven years. 

In 2015 she accepted the position of COO for an alternative investment manager to help navigate the changing regulatory environment and enable their offshore strategy.

For a year before re-joining Investec, Ruth was a project manager and functional consultant specialising in risk measurement and electronic trading enablement for banks with the financial technology firm FIS.