It’s safe to say not many 16-year-olds desperately hope to become an actuary one day. But Justin Onuekwusi, chief investment officer at St James’s Place, did – after being told by his maths teacher once that it was the the “most lucrative and prestigious profession in the world”.
And, in an even more unusual turn of events, a potentially promising career in football almost scuppered Onuekwusi’s actuary dreams.
“My head of maths told me that, given my grades, I should take double maths at A-level,” he tells Portfolio Adviser. “But the downside of that was, maths took place on a Wednesday afternoon, and that was when I played football. ‘Well’, he told me, ‘you’ll never be an actuary’.
“I wasn’t entirely sure what an actuary did, he just told me it is the most lucrative and prestigious profession in the world, where I could use maths and help people to retire without running out of money.
“I told him I would prove I could become an actuary without taking double maths.”
After a failed semi-professional career at youth level in football, between the ages of 16 and 18, Onuekwusi decided to head down the university route as opposed to becoming a professional sportsman.
With a degree in economics under his belt, and having applied for more than 70 actuary jobs, the self-penned “Manchester boy” moved to London to work for Aon Consulting as an actuarial pension student. “I realised quickly that it just wasn’t for me. My maths tutor was right!”
Having gained exposure to investment consulting through Aon’s graduate programme, however, Onuekwusi – having dropped his actuarial exams and switched to taking the CFA – first entered the world of investing.
An illustrious career then followed. By June 2006, the now-CIO was an investment consultant for pension schemes (“I was a 25-year-old boy, teaching 65-year-old men about markets. It was just surreal”). He then worked in fund manager research at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, became a multi-asset fund manager at Aviva Investors – where he help set up the firm’s multi-asset franchise for IFAs – then spent 10 years at Legal & General Investment Management, latterly as head of retail investments EMEA.
“As part of a team at LGIM, we built out a multi-asset retail business, including the flagship adviser range, the Multi-Index Funds. That was a real rollercoaster. We went from zero assets to £60bn in the space of a decade.”
Read the rest of this article in the July/August issue of Portfolio Adviser magazine
