What about IFAs, do you have a dedicated presence?
It is something we are increasingly focused on. To date, we have focused our attention on the wealth management sector in the UK, preferring to offer business-to-business investment solutions to those that themselves are packaging investment funds in discretionary or advisory programmes to the retail customer.
As we continue to expand our product line into areas such as liquid alternatives and multi-asset class, we anticipate we will become more relevant to the retail sector, but currently we are in the discovery rather than execution phase.
A large part of that growth is very much focused on supporting the client franchise. Our legal and compliance, and client service departments, for example, have probably quadrupled over those years.
When we established ourselves in August 2009, we had around 50 people in Europe – we are now close to 200.
David, who joined us from Pimco, was a great hire. Our clients keep us on our toes, but at the same time, people coming from other parts of the industry can help you improve procedures and get better at what you do. So, David is a tremendous hire and has his hands full as he joins at a time when communicating effectively with our clients is as important as it has ever been.
Does Neuberger Berman have specific plans in terms of geographical markets, product launches, marketing initiatives and business deals?
There is no big strategic plan on how we are going to dominate the world. That is just not who we are or how we think of the world. To a large extent, the future is where clients will take us.
More specifically, the trends we see are an increased use of alternatives by clients, institutional and intermediary alike, and a more outcome-orientated, less benchmark aware world, particularly on the intermediary side.
So, those are all things that we bear in mind when we think about, as my American colleagues would say, where the puck is going.
Equally, we just need to do a good job performance-wise and in communicating well to clients. The asset management industry, for all sorts of reasons, has trust issues. You mentioned fees earlier. The best thing we can do is communicate with our clients and make sure they really understand, for instance, a corporate hybrid fund, when it does well, when it doesn’t do well.
Then, of course, where we have planted seeds in new areas, it is nice if these seeds start to develop. We would love to see our Iberian and Paris efforts do well and these things normally take care of themselves when we do a nice job.
