INDEPENDENT stockbroker, J M Finn & Co has opened its second office in East Anglia in just six months.

INDEPENDENT stockbroker, J M Finn & Co has opened its second office in East Anglia in just six months.

The firm, which is based in London and also has offices in Bristol and Leeds, opened in Abbeygate Street, Bury St Edmunds, last autumn and, from yesterday, added an office in Turret Lane, just off Lower Brook Street, in Ipswich.

Two investment managers will initially be based at the Ipswich office - Dorothy Lock, who is well known locally for advising private clients over many years, and Andrew Mann, also from the Ipswich area, who trained with Gerrard Investment Management.

Dorothy Lock said: “I am much enjoying being back in the business of advising clients and am pleased to be working for a company that so values the personal element that is so important when dealing with financial matters. I am also looking forward to working again with my former colleagues.”

The chairman of J M Finn & Co, James Edgedale, added “We are pleased to have extended our business in the prosperous region of East Anglia in such a positive way and are delighted to have attracted such an experienced and talented team to our new office in Ipswich.

“Increasingly we find that clients, and their advisers, are attracted by the independence of approach we are able to adopt and we fully expect our Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds offices to be an important element in our continued expansion in the field of investment management for private clients and charities, along with the increasingly important area of personal pension funds.”

The new Ipswich office will also involve the migration of several other well-known investment managers formerly associated with the Ipswich office of Gerrard, now part of Barclays Wealth.

Over the coming weeks the investment team, supported by office staff with whom they have also worked for a number of years, will be joined by a group including Sharon Rayment, Patrick Hunter-Jones, Bruce Johnson, Andrew Norman-Butler and David Overy-Owen.

J M Finn was founded as a partnership in 1945 and, more recently, was incorporated as a private limited company. It is now one of the largest private-owned asset managers in the UK, with links to all the world's major financial centres and managing investments totalling more than £3billion.