Spiers joins InvestorWeb board

ING Financial Planning chief executive officer Mark Spiers has joined the board of InvestorWeb as a non-executive director.

Spiers’s appointment to the board follows the purchase of a 13 per cent stake in the group by ING and coincides with the appointment of a new chairman for the group, Rob Bishop.

InvestorWeb chief executive Otto Buttula says Spiers’s senior management experience in financial planning and technology will be of good use to the board.

“This experience, together with his extensive in-the-field background — particularly in individual financial planning firms and at a dealer group level — will be a valuable addition to the board,” he says.

Spiers has been in the financial services industry for more than 20 years, and spent the first 14 of these at AMP in distribution roles. He took over from Tony Muston as head of the RetireInvest financial planning group about three years ago and was appointed to oversee the other ING distribution channels last year.

Spiers says of ING’s investment in InvestorWeb was based on the long-term potential of the technology InvestorWeb is developing. Before buying the slice of the InvetorWeb business, ING financial planning subsidiary Partnership Planning became the first dealer group to sign up all its advisers to the InvestorWeb owned Visiplan software.

Also joining the board as chairman is Rob Bishop, who has worked in the financial services industry for the past 25 years, predominantly in retail banking distribution roles.

Bishop has also recently established a specialist advisory and investment group operating across Asia, the Magnolia Group. Prior to this he worked in various management roles in the banking sector at National, Westpac and Citibank.