How betting on people has paid off for Kevin Gopaul

Since joining BMO Global Asset Management in 2009, Kevin Gopaul has successfully grown the firm’s ETF business into Canada’s leader in ETF inflows for more than a decade. Underpinning that is his belief in the power of people and culture, which could be traced back to one career-defining moment.

“I believe in taking risks on an individual, probably because someone took a chance on me early in my career,” Gopaul, the President and Chief Commercial Officer at BMO ETFs at BMO Global Asset Management, said in an exclusive one-on-one interview with Wealth Professional.

He embarked on his career in finance as a fresh graduate from the University of Waterlook in 1999. During his time at Clarica, which later became Sun Life, a manager helped him make the leap from back-office operations to front-office money management.

Following that switch, he helped manage $6 billion of internal funds, and learned the ins and outs of portfolio management, trading, liquidity, and risk management. After five years, he moved on and became an index arbitrage trader at Scotia Capital, where the laser focus on client satisfaction added a service mentality to his professional toolbox.

Later on, Gopaul would become a principal portfolio manager at Barclay’s Global Investors, which at the time was one of the world’s largest independent asset managers. There he learned about ETFs and the possibility of growing the business through innovation, quantitative investing, and rigorous stress testing.

Today at BMO, Gopaul is able to pay his success forward by being willing to put his faith in people, which he says allows him to recruit the best talent for the team. The resulting culture he’s built is a particular point of pride as it’s been instrumental in helping the team stick together through the years.

“It’s been a focus of mine since day one, and we have had essentially zero voluntary turnover as a result,” he said.

To view Kevin Gopaul’s interactive digital profile piece, click here.