Charles Henderson, BA FCA
Charles started his career in 1979 training as a chartered accountant and conducting external audits of UK companies. After specialising in the audits of financial services companies, mainly building societies, fund managers and banks, at Touche Ross & Co, now Deloitte, he spent the last 25 years of his full-time working life in operational roles at the fund managers Perpetual and then Invesco, after it took over Perpetual. This included spells as a director of Perpetual’s and Invesco’s regulated UK companies. Towards the end of his career at Invesco, he became a non-executive member to the FRC’s Audit Quality Review Committee (“AQRC”) and contributed to the Quoted Company Alliance’s 2019 edition of their Audit Committee Guide. When the AQRC disbanded at the end of 2020, he became a member of the FRC’s Advisory Panel until the end of May 2024. Advisory Panel work included working with the Corporate Governance and Stewardship team on their assessments of Stewardship Code signatories. In 2021 he became an associate of Falcon Windsor, helping them occasionally with reviewing annual reports. At the beginning of 2022 Charles became a member of the Pre-emption Group representing individual investors in their monitoring of companies’ disapplications of pre-emption rights.
His interest in investing stems from a working lifetime close to fund managers and a keen interest on how UK plc reports to the markets and in governance, company reporting and auditing related matters. His investments include shares in the US listed company Invesco Limited, ISA mutual funds and his defined contribution pension pots. The ISA and pension funds invest in UK equities and he keeps a close eye on their fund managers’ major investments in UK companies. This interest in investing has led him to becoming a director of UKSA in the hope that he may contribute to relevant policy matters, help the way UK companies report to their shareholders and improve the connection between companies and their individual shareholders. He is also an active participant in the Corporate Reporting User Forum (“CRUF”) UK, the CRUF ESG subgroup, where he is currently chairman.
His hobbies and spare time interests are foil fencing, bridge, films, theatre, fell walking, gaming and reading.
