The remit of Fiera Capital’s chief executive officer, EMEA, encompasses driving the Canadian asset manager’s strategy and business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as leading its distribution, consultant relations and marketing teams across those areas – yet for Klaus Schuster, who is approaching the first anniversary of his appointment to the role, the essence of all these responsibilities is a single idea.
“My job is basically to make sure the relationship between our existing and prospective clients and our investment teams is as good as it can be,” he says. “Everything else we do as a business should then support that relationship. It is a pretty simple thought but, if we can do that properly, we should end up taking our firm to the next level.”
Before his arrival at Fiera Capital last May, Schuster had been chief executive officer, EMEA, and global head of wealth management distribution at PineBridge Investments, which he had first joined in 2001. As it happens, that was the same year Jean-Guy Desjardins sold his principal shareholding in one asset management business he had co-founded and set about building another.
Fiera Capital, of which Desjardins is still chairman and global CEO, opened its headquarters in Montreal in 2003 and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange seven years later. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the global standing of the largest Canadian pension funds, the firm has had a strong focus on institutional clients but – along with insurance and wealth management – that is now one of three “big priorities”, as Schuster puts it.
Unified approach
“The institutional side was bigger than the wealth side but the wealth side is growing tremendously,” he continues. “That is why I really wanted a strong, unified approach to investing and to serve all our clients well. When I joined Fiera and talked to the team, it was clear to me we should have a greater focus on consultant relations and serve the consultants really well, because they are our door to the institutional business.
“Another strong area of focus is our own insurance business while our third priority – and this is in no particular order – is the wealth management space. We already have the necessary investment strategies in place to do this but we sometimes just need to add the appropriate product structures – a good example being the team we have in Dayton, Ohio, who manage some $5bn (£3.96bn) in US small and mid-cap equities.
This article originally appeared in the April issue of Portfolio Adviser magazine
