Executive recruiting in the asset and wealth management business continues to strengthen, in line with record industry profitability. However, the greatest changes are occurring in narrow pockets of the industry including solutions based investing, distribution, ETFs and alternatives. Our “C” suite work has remained strong with the recruitment of the President & CEO of Calvert Investments, the President & CEO of the Money Management Institute, and our current search to recruit the next President of industry association NICSA.
Infrastructure functions remain a segment of concern in the “C” suite. We recently recruited both the Chief Financial Officer and the Head of Operations for innovative and fast growing wealth manager LPL Financial. These add to work completed last year, including the Chief Information Officer of Artisan Partners and the CFO of Great-West Financial.
In the distribution arena, we have extended our work from 2014 that included the Head of Institutional Sales for Calvert Investments and Head of Digital Marketing for MFS Investments. We are at the offer stage in recruiting the Head of Middle Market Institutional Sales (a new position) for a large firm, and we are in discussions to launch searches for the Head of Sub-Advisory Sales, the Head of Retail Sales, and the Head of Institutional Sales for other major firms. Recruiting for investment leadership has strengthened over the last two years, and we are working to recruit a senior Emerging Markets Bond Portfolio Manager, building on our work last year to recruit the Chief Investment Officer of boutique private bank Chevy Chase Trust, as well as a CIO succession planning initiative for a small deep value manager. We had our industry observations on compensation published in the “Unconventional Wisdom” column of Institutional Investor in February.
We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with our clients on these exciting initiatives. Please call or e-mail George if we can be helpful in any way, particularly if you just need further market insights across the summer into the fall budgeting and planning cycle.