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Jamie MacLeod certainly knows how to swing an interview in his favour. As I fiddle with my tape recorder, and discuss possible seating arrangements with the photographer, the PR sweeps in, spots my 1980s Walkman and tells me, “Jamie doesn’t allow tape recorders.”

What? I mumble, mentally wondering just how rude it would be to walk out of a meeting that has already been rescheduled four times. Why not? “He likes to talk freely and about his competitors, and prefers not to have anything on tape.”

Despite the opposite surely being preferable, I am seriously – and no doubt suitably – disarmed. My notes are in order; my mental pencil sharpened and ready to skewer; and here I am reduced to taking dictation. The Observer’s Lynn Barber always warns interviewers to take two tape recorders with you in case one should break. And now I’m reduced to none.

Damn, he’s good.

Since he helped to launch the company in 2003, Jamie MacLeod has set about making Skandia Investment Group into one of the UK’s main fund management houses. Skandia was restructured in November last year in a move that saw the three investment management arms, Skandia Investment Management, Skandia Global Funds and Skandia Fonder brought under the Skandia Investment Group banner – and all under the auspices of Jamie MacLeod.

SIG now has over £60bn in funds under management and around 50 fund managers and analysts. Key to its current investment strategy is its range of Best Ideas funds. The Global fund was launched in June 2006 followed by the UK version in October that year. UK Strategic came next in September 2007 and the European fund came on line for continental European investors in February this year.

Before we met, at the beginning of September, I’d examined the funds’ risk-adjusted performance and found them – and certain other areas of the overall range – chequered at best. Over one year to 1 September within their respective sectors, Global was 45th out of 81 funds and UK 289th out of 320. Just launched, UK Strategic fared better ranking 12th out of 331 funds.

Like many of the difficult questions I throw at him, Mr MacLeod doesn’t shy away from addressing it head on. “That level of innovation will take a while to catch on,” he shrugs. “But we are certain over a market cycle it will come good.

“We have 200 funds in our range and yet we don’t have any disasters.” Certainly there has been much movement within SIG itself. Three new multi-manager team members joined in September – representing 30 appointments in total over the last 12 months. “We’re now in more than 50 markets with 17 country offices and we’re looking to grow our markets with Old Mutual,” says Mr MacLeod with understandable pride. There has also been a third chief investment officer since the company was launched – although Mr MacLeod is keen to stress, understandably, that all have been lured away by greener pastures elsewhere. “They’ve all gone off and taken big jobs,” he shrugs. “People are our strength: they are our biggest asset and the thing in which I invest most of my time.”

The link with Old Mutual also gives them both deeper pockets and a wider sense of vision. One word that keeps cropping up time and time again during the interview is “innovation”, and I get the sense that having a parent company allows Mr MacLeod to take bold decisions that perhaps a smaller or maybe boutique operation would steer away from. “Apart from fully exploiting the worldwide opportunities presented within Skandia we wish to grow our links with Old Mutual as the ambition for the firm is to keep doing innovative things,” he points out. “SIG is manoeuvring within Old Mutual to leverage opportunities. The business is not going to sit on $120bn of assets and not do some meaningful stuff.”

Meaningful stuff has included the Alternative Investments fund, launched in June. Ten asset classes are available, including precious metals, timber and commodities, and Skandia has flagged it as the “the UK’s first multi-asset alternative investment fund”.

While this might seem a little esoteric, Mr MacLeod is keen to stress that IFAs are central to the overall business strategy – the new fund, for example, is open to investors at just £50 a month. “IFAs are essential,” he says, tugging at his cufflinks. “We continue to back them and continue to think their market share will grow.”

Mr MacLeod says while he favours organic growth, “we are always looking. Are we building a strategy based on acquisition? No. But we do keep an open mind, but it has to fit with the existing business.”

His has been a meteoric rise. Just 40, Mr MacLeod first started to be name-checked as the managing director of Scottish Widows Fund Management, moving to become managing director of Investec Fund Managers in 1999.

And yet, despite his confidence and evident charisma, he remains uncharacteristically reticent over one of Skandia’s key claims to innovation fame: did the firm invent the multi-manager fund? Looking back over my hastily scrawled notes later that day, I wonder what OTR means – until it strikes me that it, of course, stands for off the record: this is a man who likes to speak – as well as give – with both barrels. His unwillingness to be recorded is understandable: my notes can be quibbled and questioned, but his voice ringing true on a tape criticising his competitors could stick.

So, I ask again, did you invent the concept? “Skandia was the first company to utilise external fund links,” Mr MacLeod answers, pauses, looks at the PR in the room, smiles – almost as if in warning – and then turns back to me once more. “So, yes, I guess you could say we did.”

You seem ambitious, I counter. Would you agree with that? “I care,” he shrugs. “I don’t know if that makes me ambitious. It’s just that I care about what I do.”

Hugo Greenhalgh is Editor of Investment Adviser