James McManus is chief investment officer at J.P. Morgan Personal Investing, the UK digital wealth manager that traded as Nutmeg until 2025. An exchange-traded fund specialist who joined from Coutts in 2015, he has run the investment side of the business through its growth from start-up to the UK arm of America's largest bank.
From Coutts to a Start-Up
He came to Nutmeg in 2015 from Coutts, the private bank, and took over the portfolios of a start-up that had launched a few years earlier with a mission to democratise wealth management. He holds the CFA UK Investment Management Certificate, and Private Asset Manager voted him one of its Top 40 under 40 five times between 2017 and 2021.
Building Portfolios With ETFs
Nutmeg built its portfolios from ETFs, and he became one of the best-known voices on them in Europe. The reasons investors choose them, in his view, are choice, simplicity, diversification, transparency and cost. By 2022 Nutmeg managed more than £4.5 billion for over 170,000 UK retail investors, and he has said the pandemic changed the industry: digital wealth management, once belittled as a nice-to-have for millennials, became something established firms raced to copy.
Inside J.P. Morgan
JPMorgan Chase bought Nutmeg in 2021 and in 2025 relaunched it as J.P. Morgan Personal Investing. He stayed on as chief investment officer and was appointed a director of J.P. Morgan Personal Investing Limited on 5 February 2026. He writes the firm's market commentary for its customers.
He joined a small company that wanted to give ordinary savers the kind of portfolio management once kept for private bank clients like those at Coutts. Eleven years on, the start-up carries the name of one of the world's largest banks, and he still runs the portfolios.
