All Strategically Speaking articles
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InterviewsMercer’s Rich Nuzum: soft skills are the hardest in investment governance
Mercer’s recent acquisition of Vanguard’s outsourced chief investment officer (CIO) business and its sale of two administration units points to changes in asset management as firms continue to focus on core activities.
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InterviewsMuzinich’s Tatjana Greil Castro on credit fundamentals
In one of the meeting rooms of the London office of Muzinich & Co are displayed a series of bond certificates from the past.
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InterviewsSystematic trading for long-term investors
Man Group, the investment management company listed on the London Stock Exchange since 1994, was founded in the City of London in 1783 by James Man as a sugar brokerage firm.
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InterviewsBarings: A bond investor for changing times
Martin Horne is the new global head of public assets at Barings bond investor, but he is a bond guy through and through.
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InterviewsFiera Capital: Montreal’s succession story
If Fiera Capital were a retail store it might need a big shop window. It is perhaps better known in the institutional world outside Canada for strategies like real assets but Fiera is a full-service asset manager that is also a big deal in its home town of Montreal.
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InterviewsOpening private markets to smaller investors
“One of the biggest differentiators for us in comparison to other private markets businesses is our focus on the use of technology within the business,” says Hartley Rogers, chair of Hamilton Lane.
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InterviewsStan Moss, Polen Capital CEO: High conviction is the lifeblood of investing
The shift in macroeconomic conditions throughout 2022 must have been a relief for active managers from one perspective at least. For over a decade of low interest rates and low volatility they have had fewer chances to showcase their skills.
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InterviewsPaul Lorentz, Manulife Asset & Wealth Management: Canada to Europe, via Asia
Values are changing rapidly in the world of asset management. Leaders come and go, but perhaps less so than in the past, and loyalty to a company is increasingly appreciated by clients, as a sign of commitment and stability.
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InterviewsFranklin Templeton’s Jenny Johnson: Finding the way through the noise
When Jenny Johnson arrives, the atmosphere changes. She is composed, smiling and friendly and her boundless energy fills the room.
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InterviewsVontobel: Builders in a changing landscape
Christel Rendu de Lint, a veteran of Swiss asset and wealth management, sees herself as a builder. This claim has justification given her track record at UBP, where she built a fixed-income capability from scratch to CHF20bn (€20.5bn) over 12 years.
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InterviewsLCH: The other side of the mirror
Isabelle Girolami undoubtedly has a strong background in financial services, having worked for a range of very different institutions in very different roles. She was COO at the fixed income division of BNP Paribas, before going on to a similar role at Bear Stearns, the bank that failed early in 2008 and which was subsumed into JP Morgan. Prior to her current role at LCH she was global head of markets at Crédit Agricole.
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InterviewsNikko Asset Management: Complex, creative thinking
Stefanie Drews is at home with complexity. She speaks several languages fluently, including Japanese, and tells us she still does her maths in Italian.
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InterviewsBain Capital: Vintage private equity
“In our world, it is quite easy to describe what we do, but it is very hard to do it,” says Robin Marshall, partner at Bain Capital. That statement encapsulates the concept of private equity and is also an effective introduction to his firm. Private equity may be a straightforward idea, but in reality it is an incredibly complex undertaking, which is why the asset class remains a non-core allocation within institutional portfolios.
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InterviewsImpax rides the sustainability wave
One investment analyst sums up Impax Asset Management as a “pure sustainability play”. And certainly, according to founder and CEO Ian Simm, the core thesis of Impax is to “make the most of the investment opportunities offered by the transition to a more sustainable economy”. These are “on the scale of the Industrial Revolution”, Simm believes.
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InterviewsNewton’s Euan Munro: Seeking the best of both worlds
Euan Munro has built a formidable reputation in asset management, developing a major multi-asset absolute return strategy at Standard Life Asset Management in the 2000s. But the fortunes of his once mighty Global Absolute Return Strategy (GARS), now managed by Abrdn, have wavered as multi-asset strategies have fallen out of favour.
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InterviewsMirova’s Philippe Zaouati: realistically optimistic
Asset management CEOs tend to be a clever bunch, but there cannot be many who are familiar with the work of Antonio Gramsci, the 20th century Italian socialist philosopher.
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Features17Capital’s Pierre-Antoine de Selancy: Navigating NAV lending
Pierre-Antoine de Selancy has just left a meeting with his company’s new majority shareholder, Oaktree, and is running a little late. His days are busy. De Selancy is founder and managing partner of 17Capital, a London-based boutique specialised in providing NAV finance to private equity managers.
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FeaturesLGIM’s Michelle Scrimgeour: ambitions for growth
Michelle Scrimgeour and her executive team set out their strategic growth priorities in November 2020, a little more than a year after she had taken over as CEO of Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM). They agreed to grow the business by focusing on existing strengths: to modernise, diversify and to internationalise.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Italian, global and poised for growth
In asset management, three years can be a short or a long time, depending on many factors, including market conditions. To some asset management executives, the second half of the 2010s perhaps felt like an endless slog, due to the intense competition for market share and outperformance within the seemingly never-ending bull market. The first two years of the new decade have certainly elapsed more quickly, thanks to the historical significance of the events that have occurred.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Jose Minaya, Nuveen
Asset managers with a yield-hungry pension investor as a parent nowadays usually have to diversify their footprint into private markets, often by acquisitions in one form or another.
