A career in law is not the normal start to a career path in asset management, but for Old Mutual Global Investors (OMGI) chief executive Julian Ide, his father said he should get a professional qualification and he chose to become a solicitor.
“The law was great; it was a fantastic profession and there are some great people in it,” Mr Ide says. “But the reason I realised shortly after qualifying that I wanted to go into finance is that as a lawyer you are, in a way, helping other people do their business.
“I knew I wanted to be at the front deciding what the business direction should be, rather than supporting someone else doing it.”
Decision made, Mr Ide moved into fund management almost by chance at the suggestion of a friend, who pointed him in the direction of Merrill Lynch where he started in 1993.
He adds: “I have to say I’ve enjoyed it enormously. Most of the time I think this is a great industry and business to be in.”
The majority of his time has been spent outside the UK, including a 10-year period that covered stints in Amsterdam, Zurich and Madrid.
He recalls: “I spent 10 years essentially living in Europe, so I used to commute weekly for some of it and then moved the family for some of that period. The family lived here and I used to commute to Amsterdam on Mondays and come back on Fridays.
“And when I was at Credit Suisse I did a similar thing, but it was more like three days a week going to Zurich.
“Then in 2010 I moved the family to Madrid [when I went] to work for BBVA. I always wanted to learn Spanish and Madrid is a fabulous city. I wanted to spend some time there, so the opportunity came up to do both of those things in the same context.”
But he admits his Spanish is perhaps not as good as it should be. “It was harder than I thought and everyone spoke to me in English, which was the biggest problem.”
It’s clear that Mr Ide likes a challenge and he notes that “targets are quite a good thing. You get very focused when you have an objective in mind, as I do at the moment.”
That objective is to build OMGI into a global asset management business, with the vision of being a “leading responsible asset manager in a global context”.
Referring to the use of the word “responsible”, he explains that it’s more to do with the company’s development as an organic business and its responsibilities to five constituencies: the customers, the employees, the shareholders, the regulators and the communities in which it operates.
“That’s how we need to grow responsibly as an asset manager,” he says.
“It’s not just an OMGI vision – recently we hired someone [Jane Goodland] to be head of responsible business within the Old Mutual Wealth organisation. She has an enormous amount of experience and what impressed me was the way she approached the challenges around this.”
Mr Ide joined OMGI in 2011 and says he was attracted to the role because he saw an opportunity to lead a business “that was a small asset management company with real growth potential”.
He explains: “It’s very unusual to find an asset manager with the strength of performance that this business has and always had. We just didn’t have enough capabilities. That’s why we have gone out and hired lots of people.
“The opportunity at OMGI was to grow a small business with outstanding people into a bigger business with outstanding people, and fundamentally more relevance in the market. With the RDR coming into play, we didn’t think the model we had at the time was a sustainable model, so we built a business for ‘the RDR world’.”
In terms of his global ambitions, he notes that more than 20 per cent of the firm’s assets and earnings come from outside of the UK. “I would say that’s the beginning. There are some exciting developments to come there.”
Of course, this doesn’t come without its challenges, and for Mr Ide the biggest problem on joining the company was the lack of trust within the business.
“We’ve had to make a virtue of the difficulties that we had at the beginning and therefore created a positive culture here; a very engaged and empowered culture,” he says.
“The first big challenge here was about building trust. We were demoralised and we didn’t trust each other at all. So how do you build trust?
“You do that through transparency, talking things through with people and being as open as you can. Second is to treat people equally, and that not only means having respect for people – which it does – but it means in a tangible sense give people the same opportunities.
“It took 14 months. The first time anybody said anything positive to me was December 2012, some 14 months after I joined. What they said in effect was we are beginning to believe the story now, we are beginning to believe what we can do, and that made me realise that now we’re on to something here.”
He suggests the business should be about more than achieving financial results. “It’s more organic and if you have an engaged group of people with the right values, you then tend to find you have the right values with regards to your customers and the regulators.”
OMGI could be said to be punching above its weight in its bid to become a global business, but he notes: “It hasn’t been done many times from the base we started from and in the time frame we’re trying to do it, but there are examples in our asset management industry that have been built from small beginnings to become powerhouses.”
The company’s culture is clearly something Mr Ide has worked on and which remains crucial to the success of the business.
He notes: “The challenge is to create a vision that is audacious yet at the same time believable, as those two things are normally mutually exclusive. People here don’t say things can’t be done any more.
“People used to scoff and the market scoffed too. I’m not trying to say we are some clever thing no one else has done. We’re a small- to medium-sized manager, but we have a culture here that is incredibly powerful.”
While emphasising the importance of the culture and the flat structure at OMGI “where people believe themselves to be the equals of others”, he notes that “it is all about humility as well”.
He explains: “If you start believing that you’re better than other people or your organisation is better than others: first you’re generally deluded, and second you are on the road to destruction. So it is really important to remain humble and recognise where you are in the journey, and recognise that we have customers that we are serving.
“The amazing thing about fund management is it’s a bit like an academic exercise with a lot of analysis. But it’s analysis combined with decisions, and those decisions are exposed every moment of every day against the market. So it’s a very humbling place to be.”
Reflecting on his career so far, Mr Ide adds: “I suspect that when I was 25 I probably thought I wouldn’t be working like this now, but I have to say I feel more motivated now. This is partly because you can almost see the finish line, in a way, so I feel more motivated to do things now than I’ve ever been.”
CV
Julian Ide
2012 – present
Chief executive, Old Mutual Global Investors
2011 – 2012
Chief executive and global head of distribution, Old Mutual Asset Management
2010 – 2011
Managing director and head of institutional business, BBVA Asset Management
2009 – 2010
Chief executive, Knightons Capital
2007 – 2009
Managing director, chief operating officer UK and chief of staff EMEA, Credit Suisse Asset Management
2003 – 2007
Global head of products and distribution, ABN Amro Asset Management
2001 – 2002
Managing director and head of European funds, Schroder Investment Management
1993 – 2001
Managing director, head of distributor sales and chief executive, UK retail, Merrill Lynch Investment Managers
