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Bob Yerbury, chief investment officer at Invesco Perpetual, is arguably the UK's most important investment professional. His Henley-on-Thames-based employer, Invesco Perpetual - where he was chief executive from 2004 until last year - has more retail and institutional money under management than any other fund house in the country.

Even while juggling the roles of chief executive and chief investment officer simultaneously, Mr Yerbury found time, and still does, to run four of the firms retail portfolios. Persistence alone would be enough to earn Mr Yerbury his seat on the IMA board.

Yet perhaps Mr Yerbury's most significant accomplishment in his four decades as an investor has not been to manage billions, but to cultivate them. First, he has spent the last 26 years of his career at Invesco Perpetual and has persuaded others to stay with him, minimising the upheaval of manager moves. Second, he handled a difficult integration with US parent Invesco that has seen his division retain its independence, even as a branch of a multinational. Third, he hauled a chunk of the firm from the modish office blocks of London to the Oxfordshire countryside, swapping the herd mentality of the City for a red-brick quadrangle where, judging by its appearance, he might have received the master's degree in maths he holds from Cambridge.

But even in a well-heeled constituency like Henley, where the Conservatives will have been in power for a century if they retain their seat at the next election, Mr Yerbury has had to do more to keep Invesco as one of the area's largest employers than just to network at its Oxbridge-style boat races.

He speaks openly about the hardships of the last decade, which encompass not only the integration of Perpetual into its owner, but also the TMT bust, the September 11 attacks, this financial crisis and, as a result, appalling returns from Invesco Perpetual's core asset classes, developed-world equities and debt. While the most noted adjective in the interview is "involved", the most noted adverb is "frankly".

"Frankly, I look back now, and I don't know how I did it," he says. "Inevitably, when you're doing four jobs, something gives. You work longer hours, you work weekends and whatever, but you also cut down the number of hours you spend doing each one of them."

Oddly, "cutting down" seemed to work best in Mr Yerbury's role as chief executive, where, he says, "you lean very heavily on other people – it's much more about delegating".

By the time he took on the job, his 21-year commitment to Perpetual had worked in his favour. His predecessor, Rob Hain, had helped integrate Trimark into Invesco's previous incarnation Amvescap and came across the Atlantic to do the same at Perpetual. As Andrew Williams, his right-hand man on the distribution side, put it, they endured exhausting flights in crumpled suits between the US and the UK only to be met with hitches and disappointments, particularly the idea bonuses might partly depend on divisions overseas.

When Messrs Hain and Williams left to set up multi-boutique asset manager City Financial, Mr Yerbury set about tackling the new strategy under Amvescap's latest chief executive, Marty Flanagan, which, as far as Perpetual was concerned, focused on integrating operations and IT systems under the new Invesco brand.

"There was more travel involved," he says, matter of factly.

By "getting much more involved with the entity that was Invesco and with the overall management team", Mr Yerbury forced board members to respect what were now Invesco Perpetual's, not just Perpetual's, successes.

"My job was to ensure at every stage we had the service we needed," he says. "It was turbulent, but as far as the business here was concerned, we had all the funding to manage it."

Since stepping down as chief executive, Mr Yerbury has remained the senior investment professional for Invesco as a whole, although, in his words, "there isn't anything in terms of philosophy or process we're looking to bring in" from elsewhere in the group.

But, ironically, investment – "frankly, my first love" – weathered the period worse for Mr Yerbury in some respects, with underperforming spells in two of his four retail funds.

A key example is his International Equity vehicle, where Mr Yerbury kept a reasonable weighting in North America at the start of the crisis, but was caught out by the ferocity of the markets.

"We had poor performance in the US on the international fund. That upset me because I spent 25 years running US portfolios" – partly as head of the North American team at Perpetual – "and I refused to believe you couldn't make money in the US."

Did he have enough time to run such strategies? "You make time." Or, in Mr Yerbury's case, you read the necessary research in the evenings after work. Another tack – did drawing on Invesco Perpetual's best ideas and co-ordinating them into funds reduce performance? "That approach didn't hurt the portfolio. I didn't do all the analysis myself, but I could tap into expertise from across the group."

But now he is "only" chief investment officer, Mr Yerbury is "much more actively involved" with his "first love", his funds included. The new chief executive aside, his most important working relationship is with his head of investment, Neil Woodford, who in the last year or so has been lead manager on roughly half of Invesco Perpetual's client assets.

"I'm not picking stocks, investing and running portfolios full-time - Neil is," he says. "It's recognition of his status in the company. You want his views on anything."

One subject he and Mr Woodford tussle over is house prices. "Neil was very bearish early on. I was more sanguine. After a dip in 2004, it went bonkers again off the back of securitisation, so initially I was right. Recently, I've been horribly wrong."

This ambivalence on house prices, among other things, has helped Invesco Perpetual evade troubles with the banks while not giving up performance during the bull market. Mr Yerbury says Mr Woodford "didn't understand how banks were making their returns as far back as 2005", given optimistic forward earnings estimates and leverage, as well as the housing bubble.

For companies the manager does invest in, such debates produce a firm stance. According to the chief investment officer, "Neil is going to own a company for five years, and his turnover is less than 20 per cent a year".

Given the size of his funds, does he use liquid derivatives to take shorter-term stances? "We use derivatives for hedging purposes," Mr Yerbury says. "If you have a sterling-based fund, it's quite normal to hedge a euro-denominated instrument." On his bond funds, Mr Woodford's co-managers also use hedging to alter the duration of their investments. "They will also have some credit default swap exposure, which has been fairly recent."

But in spite of derivatives experience and a knack for spotting losers, Mr Yerbury rules out the possibility of an absolute return fund at Invesco Perpetual. "It takes a different mentality. You need to be very good at selling stock. A lot of people have received credit for being short the banks, but some of those hedge funds were short banks for two years before that, and it wasn't going their way for a while."

But some of the tools of the activist hedge fund manager are still available to the firm. As a large long-only player, it has a substantial say in the future of the companies in which it invests. To illustrate some of the principles, and ambiguities, behind his lobbying as a shareholder, Mr Yerbury cites Stuart Rose's controversial promotion to executive chairman at Marks & Spencer.

"Separation of functions is preferable because of the notion of challenge," he says. "In most companies, the chief executive needs challenging. In some companies, that wasn't happening.

"In the case of Stuart Rose, we were maybe more relaxed than others. Is it ideal? No. The question is whether that individual is subject to challenge from non-executive directors. It's a more company-specific thing."

Although Mr Yerbury shows the firm's voting record on such issues to his clients, he is wary of publishing it or engaging in public campaigns. "It's not desirable to raise the profile of anything through the media."

But the chief investment officer makes an exception for the IMA's reform of its UK Equity Income sector, which until the beginning of this year housed billions of his clients' assets. He describes the removal of non-compliant funds, including Mr Woodford's, into the new UK Equity Income & Growth sector as "backward-looking" and "just plain wrong".

"The view was, some funds were not meeting the income requirement. But the problem was, they were proposing a change whose timing was frankly unfortunate, as from last summer onwards, dividends were being cut. It was a mistake."

He observes Mr Woodford, among others, had avoided investing in banks whose historical yields were high, but that were likely to cut their payouts. After the manager's removal from the sector, bank dividends were slashed.

"At one stage, banks represented 30 per cent of the dividend income," he says. "Neil didn't own them - for very sound investment reasons - and has been vindicated."

He points out Mr Woodford is now expecting to grow his dividends to 5 per cent and achieve a yield of 120 per cent of the FTSE All-Share index, well in excess of the UK Equity Income sector requirement.

Mr Yerbury supports the idea equity income funds should maintain or grow dividends in real terms, saying it would be "a good measure" to add to the UK Equity Income sector definition.

In response, the IMA says it recognises the composition of market yield is fast-moving and uncertain and that it will review the sectors in January 2010, or at another appropriate juncture. But the association may have to lobby Mr Yerbury harder if it wants a warmer welcome at the Henley Regatta this year.