After Dean Bowden joined Thesis Asset Management straight out of university in 1997, he ended up staying at the firm for 10 years. He moved on to Skandia International in 2007 and has been with the company ever since. He laughs as he says: “I tend to stick at places, I’m loyal to the institution I work for.”
What kept Mr Bowden in his first role for a decade was the “phenomenal grounding” it gave him. Having decided that it was the investment industry he wanted to forge a career in after graduating from Southampton Solent University, he took a role at private client firm Thesis Asset Management.
He says: “Being a small company you have to get involved in everything. So instead of being a jack of all trades and master of none, you become a master of all because you have to. The opportunities that afforded meant I ended up staying there nearly 10 years.”
He started out as a portfolio assistant before eventually working his way up to head of the fund-of-funds managed service at the firm.
That experience at Thesis has obviously stayed with Mr Bowden. During the recruitment process for a role in his team at Skandia, he describes being asked by one of the candidates why everyone who had been shortlisted came from a private client background.
Mr Bowden explains: “Because those people have had to sit in front of the clients and that, to me, is the biggest learning experience. Actually having to see Colonel and Mrs Mustard on a regular basis and explain what you’ve done with their pension pot and the impact that has when the markets are down. I went through that process during the dotcom bubble crash and it was a very emotive experience. You are sat in front of people talking to them about their life savings.”
He continues: “I think as an industry we’ve been guilty of forgetting that at times and just seeing the numbers. Those people don’t care about relative performance, they want to know they’re going to get their income and that their pension pots are still there.
“Humanising what we’re doing was a massive grounding. So bringing that into what we do now and seeing the way regulation and the entire industry is moving towards customer focus is quite refreshing.”
Mr Bowden admits it was a difficult decision to leave Thesis after so long at one institution, but he had been approached by Skandia, which was in the process of separating its UK and international business. The firm was looking for someone to take up the chief investment officer position for the international business. He believes it was his fund of funds experience that helped him secure the role.
He adds: “The international experience was something I hadn’t had at Thesis so I just felt it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
“I had to come in [to Skandia] to really broaden my horizons and do something fundamentally different. Ultimately, I moved away from managing money, which was a big decision. I thoroughly enjoyed that at the time but, as I say, the opportunity to come in and oversee a proposition in about seven or eight markets and build something new – that was the bit that caught my attention.”
It was not simply a case of replicating the UK model either, but redesigning and building a model that was fit for each of the markets.
Mr Bowden took up his current role at Skandia in 2012 and describes it as similar to his previous position at the company, although he has absorbed the UK and European businesses now.
“I’m effectively doing the same role but for the entire business now, not just one subset of it,” he notes. “The trajectory to get there is not as clean as that sounds, so during my time while chief investment officer for international I was also working for Skandia Investment Group. It was one of the businesses that merged to form Old Mutual Global Investors.”
He suggests that he “bridged the gap” between the asset management and life side of the business, and the platform part of the industry. When the two asset management businesses merged, he asserts that there was the need for absolute clarity. It was then that he was asked to sit firmly in the wealth business and take over the platform operations. His aim then, on taking up the new role, was to align practice across the board.
He elaborates: “I think if you looked across all of the businesses at Old Mutual Wealth, disparate is probably too strong a word, but they were not aligned. As a business, we couldn’t say what it is we’re trying to do. I think the word ‘solution’ is overused, but what is our solution to the market from an investment proposition perspective?”
Mr Bowden acknowledges that while every market has nuances and investors in each region also differ, what was missing was a common set of values and good practice across the markets the business served.
While that piece of work is coming to a close, he insists that one of the highlights for him at Skandia has been the opportunity to work in different markets and with other cultures.
Reacting to regulation in those various markets is one of the challenges he faces now, although he insists that is what keeps the role exciting.
“What we’re seeing is most markets globally moving to the RDR [the Retail Distribution Review]. At the moment I’m in the throes of rebuilding the South African proprietary proposition. I’m down there in September relaunching it into the market because they have the RDR… so we’ve had to re-engineer the proposition to cope with those regulatory changes.”
Skandia’s own reaction to the RDR in the UK was to build and launch its WealthSelect proposition, which finally came to market on February 24 2014. It is a restricted fund range offering that is open to advisers. They are able to use the products offered in the range, all of which are run by third-party managers, in their own portfolios or in risk-rated model portfolios run by Old Mutual Global Investors.
The WealthSelect product was a huge undertaking. Paul Feeney, who heads up Old Mutual Wealth, floated the original concept to Mr Bowden roughly two years ago.
He observes: “We were looking for the best managers we could obtain in each of the asset classes. We had a roadmap of asset classes we wanted to populate that we felt were appropriate and needed to have a portfolio that worked. And it’s not just a portfolio for today, it is a portfolio that will react to different market conditions.”
He adds: “We understood the quality of the individuals we wanted and what you could expect to see in that proposition, as opposed to it being, ‘Let’s just see what price we can get and which fund group is going to give me the best financials and we’ll pick their managers’.”
It has not been all about work for Mr Bowden though, who has a 10-month-old daughter and a keen interest in surfing to keep him occupied outside working hours. He recalls surfing holidays in Newquay and further afield with his teenage son, and admits that his daughter already has her own wetsuit.
As for the industry, Mr Bowden considers whether its attitude to customers’ needs has changed in recent years.
“Interestingly, when you have any conversation with anyone in the industry, the first thing people say is ‘customer’,” he says.
“I think six months ago it was happening but it was probably more forced. There has been a recognition that if you get the customer bit right, the rest of it tends to follow.”
CV: Dean Bowden
July 2012-present – Head of investment solutions, Skandia
2007-2012 – Chief investment officer, Skandia International
1997-2007 – Head of the fund-of-funds managed service, Thesis Asset Management
