David Guest LLB FPMI

David is a senior member of Barnett Waddingham’s Board Management Services (BMS) team and is an experienced governance specialist with a strong consulting and administration background. He has almost 20 years’ industry experience. 

Having previously held roles in operations management, he has significant experience in structuring teams and processes. In his current role, he has used this experience to support trustee boards in structuring their risk and governance processes. With a keen interest in streamlining processes and driving up efficiency, David played an integral role in the development of BW CORE as a member of Barnett Waddingham’s firmwide General Code Steering Group.  

David is also passionate about client account management and leads an internal group responsible for ensuring that consultants have the requisite skills, knowledge and resources to lead client relationships. He is also the client lead and Scheme Secretary for one of Barnett Waddingham’s largest client schemes. 

He has a degree in Law and is a Fellow of the Pensions Management Institute. 

Significant experience

• David is product lead for BW CORE, which is a system he designed as part of his role on the General Code Steering Group, having taken a lead role in developing the concept. 
• David has held various all-services client relationship manager roles within BW, including on two of our largest and high-profile administration clients. That’s come about partly because of his background in administration, and his previous role as Admin Operations Manager at Mercer, where David had a large team in the UK across two locations and for a period directly managed a team in India as part of an offshoring project he co-led. 
• Another part of his role is leading a new support function that he has set up within BMS to help our consultants specifically with client management.  
• As part of this, David runs regular client lead support sessions, which provide a forum for open discussion and collaborative support.  
• Leading one of our latest GMP projects, from reconciliation through to rectification and equalisation.  
• On various aspects of pension scheme governance and risk management, particularly in relation to risk registers, the Effective System of Governance/ General Code requirements, and the Own Risk Assessment (a new requirement under the General Code).  

Other experience

In previous roles, David has:

• Co-led a project to offshore a significant amount of work to India. This included project planning, reshaping existing processes to help facilitate a smooth transition, testing, feedback and coaching new colleagues in India, successfully overcoming multiple challenges to complete the transition within a three-year period. 
• Managed two projects teams across three locations (Bristol, Glasgow and India), and played a key role in reforming several processes, including his department’s workflow management system.  
• Directly managed a number of colleagues across different locations and successfully dealt with several challenging situations, including performance-related matters, personal issues, and managing teams in different locations (including India) during the COVID-19 pandemic.