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This sounds serious when you are in the crucial stages of floating an independent business that you had been mulling over for years but Wauters is unfazed. "It was good that I was in hospital when we were moving. Margaret [the office manager] didn't want the boss around being a nuisance."
The six-strong team at Coriolis Capital, a fund management company dedicated to catastrophe bonds and weather derivatives, moved from SG, where it was a hedge fund management team within the bank dedicated to the same areas.
Enhanced position Wauters says Coriolis's independence enhances its business case: "Being independent avoids any potential conflict of interest of a fund management arm sitting within a bank."
He'd actually been thinking of setting up his own company for years and what would be needed to make it work. "We could have done it four years ago but we needed a critical mass of assets to manage."
Because the team has been working together for ages the decision to go independent was a lot easier. Wauters, Margaret Duke-Wyer, operations manager Caine Nicholls, portfolio managers Guillaume Legal and Martin Jones, and legal and compliance officer Jean Terren had all worked together at SG.