With a company as large and well known as JPMorgan, it can often be easily assumed they already cover most, if not all, asset classes. But for Tony Lanning, one of the attractions of joining the company was to develop a new, multi-manager solution that “genuinely feels different from what was already out there”.
As the fund manager behind the range of JPMorgan Fusion Funds, launched in 2013, he says: “JPMorgan has been running multi-asset money for a very long time, but it is probably a fair acknowledgment that we were quite late to the party in multi-manager in the UK. I don’t think we could have been quite so bold as to rock into town and say we’ve got something the same as everybody else, but we’re JPMorgan, so use us.
“Long before I agreed to join, we talked about how we could enter the market with a new, exciting and differentiating way of running multi-manager money and that was really the genesis of Fusion.”
Like most of those who end up in fund management, the desire to manage money was one that developed later on, although Mr Lanning admits that he “always wanted to work in the City”, with his first role as a dealer for a company based in what was the old London Stock Exchange. “I stumbled into fund management from there really, so I didn’t wake up one morning and say I wanted to be a fund manager.”
But he adds: “I genuinely feel like being a portfolio manager is a very privileged position to be in. I spend my day meeting some of the smartest minds in the industry, whether that is people within JPMorgan or other managers we invest in through the Fusion Funds. And when you work in financial markets, no day is ever the same, so there is no humdrum routine, apart from the commute, which doesn’t get any easier.”
The specialisation into the multi-manager and multi-asset side of the industry was also unplanned to some extent. After his stint on the dealing side he moved into collectives research. “Initially, I wasn’t managing money I was just analysing and putting together the best advice panels and that kind of thing.”
But it was while he was head of collectives research at Arbuthnot Latham Private Bank that Gartmore came calling to get him to join their multi-manager business. “Within 12 months, I’d become head of the Gartmore multi-asset business,” he says.
In the four years he was at Gartmore, he experienced both the “excitement” of the company’s flotation in 2009, through to its eventual acquisition by Henderson Global Investors in 2011. “I went across to Henderson to work with Bill McQuaker, and quite honestly I thought I would end up retiring quite happily there. I worked very closely with Bill and the team and I liked everybody there a lot.
“Then I got approached by JPMorgan and found myself questioning why I would leave somewhere where I was really happy. So I find myself here more because of the opportunity, the chance to come up with an offering in the multi-manager space that genuinely feels different from the others out there,” he explains.
Mr Lanning points out one of the key differentiators of the Fusion proposition is that while the funds are distributed through JPMorgan Asset Management, the money is actually managed from within JPMorgan’s private bank.
“The private bank was previously the domain of the ultra-high net worth, people lucky or privileged enough to have high net worth, and then if you were in that position you had access to the best thinking of JPMorgan Private Bank. One of the things we thought would be very cool was if we could offer that same best thinking to mums, dads, grannies and grandads in the UK retail market.”
Mr Lanning runs the Fusion Fund range alongside his colleague, Nick Roberts, another former Gartmore alumni, but the two form part of a 60-strong unit called the Global Access team, of which more than three-quarters are based in New York. This access to a team based around the globe has been another attraction to the role for the manager.
“I’ve always worked within UK businesses where, yes, we recognise that when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, but now my day feels quite different. I now do all the things I used to do at Gartmore or Henderson until lunchtime and then New York wakes up. We have a second morning meeting at 1pm and then the rest of the day I spend talking to my colleagues in the US.
“It does make you appreciate and think about the world a little bit more globally and that’s reflected in the way the Fusion Funds are allocated in terms of where we put our money. We are respectful of our UK investors but if we think there are better investment ideas outside of the UK, then we’re not afraid to invest there.”
For example, he points to the fact in 2013 the Fusion range’s higher-risk product was more than 40 per cent invested in US equities, as “that was our highest conviction area of the market”.
Meanwhile, he notes: “The other thing that was very attractive to me is I get access to a 40-strong team who are specialists in particular areas of the market, and they spend every day trying to find new fund ideas for me and the other portfolio managers.
“To contextualise that at Gartmore there were five of us that ran the money and met all the managers and I thought we did a really good job. Now I have 40 people based in the US, UK and Asia helping me identify new and interesting managers. It is that additional resource I used to dream about having and now I have access to.”
He adds this extra research capability means some of the underlying managers the range invests in are often difficult to access in the UK market, so “the funds we buy may look a bit different to other mainstream fund-of-fund houses”.
Looking ahead, Mr Lanning recognises the fact that regulation such as the RDR has driven many advisers to outsourcing solutions, which is an objective the Fusion Funds cater to.
“We’re looking to build Fusion by making long-term strategic relationships with intermediaries, who understand how we run our money and philosophically how we think about markets and allow the adviser to do the tough bit to find new clients, spend their time identifying objectives and more importantly what their risk profiles are. Then my job is to make sure that I don’t disappoint them and make sure my balanced fund really does behave like a balanced fund.”
“It is very much about managing to expectations and making sure I don’t give the advisers and their clients any nasty surprises, and that’s kind of what I think about every day really.”
He says that while the fund range is only 16 months old, he is “very much satisfied” with the current range of five funds. “I measure success in terms of managing expectations but I also want to make sure the suite of funds perform and that there is a linear relationship between all of the funds. So the Growth Plus fund should demonstrably have the highest risk, then the Growth fund will have a little less risk, and then Balanced will have less risk than that.
“We might not ever be the best performing multi-manager fund in the marketplace, but we’re certainly unlikely to be the worst performing. We do have an income fund but it’s a lower-risk income fund, so it is at the bottom of the risk spectrum. We inevitably get asked by clients if we can get a fund with a ‘sexier’ yield, but in order to do that we’d have to move the fund up the risk spectrum and then we’d be out of kilter with the rest of the range. At the moment I’m very much satisfied with a range of five.”
CV – Tony Lanning
2013 - present Managing director and portfolio manager – JP Morgan Fusion Funds
2011-2013 Director of multi-manager – Henderson Global Investors
2007-2011 Head of multi-asset – Gartmore Investment Management
2005-2007 Head of collective research – Arbuthnot Latham Private Bank
