Philip O’Sullivan, Investor Relations at Bank of Ireland, what you should add to your investing armoury, Investing Matters Podcast - Episode 28

Investing Matters

Welcome to this brand-new investing podcast from the London South East. My name is Peter Higgins, you can find me on Twitter @conkers3 and I will be your host for this series of Investing Matters podcasts.

What can you expect from the Investing Matters podcasts? A great question. You will find long form interviews with noteworthy veterans and experts from the investment and fund management industry. During these interviews each interviewee will share and impart their knowledge, learning and insights on what aspects of Investing truly matters to them and what in their view should matter to investors. We hope this knowledge exchange benefits all and enables all those accessing and listening to these podcasts to achieve even greater investing success.

With that in mind, welcome to episode twenty-six, which is with the hugely talented Philip O’Sullivan whose roles including being a former Chief Economist at Investec (Ireland) and presently as an Investor Relations professional with the Bank of Ireland.

Born in Cork, by the time Philip was 18 years of age and old enough to invest in his own name, it was the tail end of the 1990s. The Dot.Com bubble had not yet burst, and the mania had everyone talking about the markets. Ireland was going through a huge period of economic growth called the Celtic Tiger, this would later morph into a credit fuelled bubble that hit Ireland harder than most other countries when the Global Financial Crisis struck.

In 2000, Philip studied Finance at the University College of Cork and still to this day has meticulous records of his early investments. Some of which describes as making “rookie mistakes” with. Fortuitously, it was during his Finance degree that he did a placement for nine months in Goodbody Stockbrokers in Dublin. Then, as now, it was part of Allied Irish Bank. He worked on the Research team, and I must have excelled as they asked him to come back on a permanent basis when he graduated.

At Goodbody Stockbrokers, he worked on the sell-side, alongside some really gifted Equity Analysts and Economists, to pitch his own research ideas to the Sales team and the traders. He also got opportunities to go on Investor roadshows and attend sales desk briefings with some of the top CEOs, including those Ryanair, CRH or Paddy Power (Flutter). During his seven years at Goodbody Stockbrokers from 2004 to 2011, Philip gained a vast wealth of great experience - working across Economics, Equity Research and Equity Sales. Plus, a fantastic analytics grounding in both the macro and the micro.

In 2011 Philip went back to academia full-time and successfully completed a one-year MBA. Very shrewd though he did some financial journalism and blogging alongside his studies. As an accomplish write, he wrote the markets column for an Irish magazine called Business and Finance, some columns for the business section of the Irish edition of The Sunday Times.

It was quality of his articles in the Sunday Times columns that landed him the job of Chief Economist at Investec Bank in Ireland from 2012 onwards. His Chief Economist role was a very broad one that encompassed; work on the Bond desk; supporting the Wealth and Investment business; presenting to Treasury clients on interest rates and exchange rates; working alongside Corporate Finance on client pitches; Equity Research; supporting the Sales Desk in its client engagement and much more.

In 2019 Philip was headhunted to work in Investor Relations for The Bank of Ireland which is the biggest Bank in Ireland. Whilst the role of Investor Relations is very different to being a sell-side analyst or an Economist. It is the combination of all the skills and experiences that Philip has learned over nearly a quarter of a century, that makes him a vital individual in the continued growth of The Bank of Ireland Group with respect to its regional, national and global clients.