Appointments: RBS; BGF; Chamber International

THE Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and NatWest have appointed David Salisbury as head of real estate Yorkshire and the North East.

In his new role he will lead and develop relationships with clients, embed business development plans across the patch and enable his 11-strong team to maximise time with clients throughout the market.

Salisbury has 32 years of corporate banking experience including 15 years of specialist work in real estate lending across the North.

Prior to his appointment he was the senior director corporate real estate Leeds at RBS.

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BUSINESS Growth Fund (BGF), set up to help the UK’s growing smaller and medium sized businesses, has expanded its Talent Network team in the North with the appointment of Victoria Robson.

Robson joins BGF’s Leeds office and will further develop the firm’s relationships with a broad network of experienced business leaders across the region.

Her role as talent network manager will be to cultivate BGF’s relationships with a range of experienced senior business leaders in order to offer BGF investee companies unique access to a pool of expert and inspirational talent.

BGF has already introduced 48 senior non-executive chairman and directors to its growing portfolio of 60 investee companies.

Robson joins the Leeds team and will work across BGF’s seven national offices, with a particular focus on building BGF’s regional network across the north which includes Manchester, Leeds, the North East, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

She was formerly with Directorbank, where she gained 13 years’ experience managing the firm’s relationships with senior executives and non-executives across a range of sectors and geographies but with a particular focus on healthcare.

During her time at Directorbank, Robson placed executive and non–executive board directors on a permanent and interim basis for a diverse client base including VC funds; privately owned enterprises; mid-market private equity firms and mid-cap public companies.

Investment momentum across BGF’s Manchester and Leeds offices has been strong recently with a strong pipeline of investment opportunities on the horizon. BGF recently completed a £2.5m investment in Rotherham based specialist interiors subcontractor Horbury Group which was the first South Yorkshire based business that BGF has backed so far and the team completed a further investment in the North East of England which will be announced in due course.

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INTERATIONAL trade specialist Chamber International has expanded its team again with the sixth new appointment since March in response to growing demand for export support.

Amy Whitehead has joined Enterprise Europe Network Yorkshire, which has been integrated into Chamber International Bradford, as a project coordinator. She will carry out research to match the needs of Yorkshire businesses to expertise available within the Enterprise Europe Network

Her appointment follows that of a new Enterprise Europe Network business adviser, a senior export associate, a new import-export services manager and two new trade administrators.

Chamber International assists chambers of commerce with a wide range of specialist international trade services and is also supporting Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) by delivering its We Are International export campaign, which aims to being an extra £1.6bn to ten local authority areas and create thousands of new jobs in the next five years.