Mr Southern will join Mirabaud in September as a sales director and report to Paul Boughton, the firm’s head of sales and marketing for the UK and northern Europe.
The sales director started his career at Fidelity in 2000, and also worked at Legg Mason and Allianz Global Investors before joining Four Capital in 2011. Sanlam took a controlling stake in Four last year.
“Over the past few years we have added more skillsets and have built an excellent stable of products managed by a very capable team of seasoned investment professionals,” Mr Boughton said.
“Due to the robust investment processes and performance of these funds we are starting to see significant interest across the range and with James’s industry experience and wide range of contacts we see this as an opportunity to broaden our reach into the UK intermediary market.”
This is the latest in a raft of UK hires by the Swiss asset manager, which has CHF 8.5bn (£5.6bn) in assets under management.
In 2013 the asset manager hired Aviva Investors’ London head of high yield Andrew Lake, and Axa Framlington’s global manager Anu Narula.
At the start of this year it poached a fixed income team from Dutch pension firm Syntrus Achmea Asset Management in order to launch a global bond fund.
