Portfolio Adviser: Clearly there is a lot of bench strength within Schroders’ asset management team, but how does one plan for something like Julie Dean’s departure?
Robin Stoakley: In your mind you always have a contingency and you hope it doesn’t happen, but we always have a contingency and some are more developed than others. With Julie, it was a surprise for us and a disappointment for us but after some discussion it was pretty obvious that the individual that we asked and who has agreed to take over the portfolio, Matt Hudson, was the obvious choice – someone that had worked with her for 10 years and is an advocate of the business cycle approach – so would carry on investing in the same way.
Everyone was on the same page pretty quickly and was of the view that Matt should take over. In the event that other people leave, one does the same exercise. I will be honest, for some people it would be pretty hard to do, and others it would be pretty easy.
PA: Does this change anything in terms of the UK team?
RS: Absolutely not. If you are talking about the UK equity team, the team is very significant, there are four or five teams operating different investment approaches within the overall UK equities business, of which business cycle is one, everything else is unchanged. Within the business cycle team, Matt replaces Julie, he will bring in resources to help him if he feels that he needs it and we will carry on.
PA: How important going forward will it be to have big name managers. Will that continue to be a trend within the sector?
RS: Privately, most fund managers would love to say no; that actually moving to the team-based approach where you haven’t got the individual super-stars would be an ideal world. The problem is the market is just not like that. The market likes to have focal points, or rather, focal people. I have been in the industry for 30 years, and for 30 years there has always been a focus on individuals. Obviously everybody knows that individuals are supported by teams, for example Neil Woodford wouldn’t have achieved what he has been able to achieve if he didn’t have a team behind him but it is all about Neil Woodford. I don’t see any evidence of that changing because fund management is an art, just as much if not more than a science.
PA: Is it better to grow your own talent or to bring in superstars?
RS: I think it is a mixture, if you look at some of our people, some of our strongest managers have been grown from scratch. Matthew Dobbs Andrew Rose, Nick Kirrage, Kevin Murphy Andy Brough, Robin Parbrook, these are all world class fund managers who have all either come as graduates or as very young employees whose first job running money has been at Schroders, and they are here, so growing your own can be fantastic. But, equally, bringing in talent can be very useful. I think there are merits to both, if you can bring people in and they fit in and work well, they can be a great addition, as for example, a lot of the Cazenove people are and Matt would be a good example of that.
PA: Looking back now, does Julie Dean’s departure change the complexion of the Cazenove deal at all?
RS: Not at all. The Cazenove deal was done first and foremost for the wealth management side, at the time of purchase two thirds of the assets were from the wealth manager. It was primarily to give a complete change of scale to our private wealth management offering. The fact that Cazenove had a very successful funds unit was an additional benefit. The area that most excited me was the multi-manager business. Cazenove had, and still does under Schroders a really top class multi manager business headed by Marcus Brookes, that was something that was completely missing from our armoury and I was able to take that team, slot it in and it gave us immediately a world class multi-manager that we could go and promote under the Schroders banner.
