Wellington Management’s new(ish) CEO has plenty of tasks on her to-do list. Making an acquisition is not one of them.
Speaking at the Investment Company Institute’s (ICI) annual membership meeting last week, Wellington CEO Jean Hynes was asked whether the firm was planning any deals.
While Hynes reiterated her desire to grow the firm’s private markets business, which launched less than a decade ago, and noted her firm’s recent lift-out of a long/short team, she said she did not think Wellington needed to make any further mergers or acquisitions.
‘We have scale across investment platforms, across our capabilities,’ she said. ‘We have a very large technology budget, and we think technology will really change how we’re going to invest in the future. So we don’t believe that we’ll make an acquisition for scale.’
Hynes, a longtime manager of the $46bn Vanguard Health Care fund, took over as CEO of the $1.3tn asset manager last June, succeeding Brendan Sword. She joined Wellington in 1991 after graduating from Wellesley College and has been a pharma/biotech analyst as well as leader of Wellington’s healthcare sector research team.
During a question and answer session at the ICI conference, chaired by the group’s president and CEO Eric Pan, Hynes also discussed the changing workforce at Wellington, how she hopes to shape the company, and the challenge of attracting young people as employees and investors.
‘We at Wellington have made progress, but there’s a lot more progress to be made, too,’ she said on the topic of diversity.
‘When I grew up at Wellington, back in the 1990s, it was a tremendously wonderful culture,’ Hynes said, ‘of white men who went to a very narrow set of schools. And I loved every minute of it.’
But it wasn’t until she had been at the firm for several years that diversity started to become a focus for the company, Hynes said.
‘There weren’t those role models on the investing side,’ she said, noting that she was able to find ‘a strong group’ at the company who helped her learn how to manage work and family life, balancing being a mother of four daughters and the manager of a massive fund.
Hynes said that the firm has diversified the location of its workforce over the last few years, with some 30% of the firm’s 3,000 employees now based in Europe or Asia, rather than its Boston headquarters.
Another shift is generational, and Hynes said she hoped Wellington’s programs would not just succeed in attracting early-career talent, but in drawing in ‘extremely diverse’ tranches of new workers.
Asked by Pan about how to lure investors from the Millennial and Z generations, who are more inclined toward retail investment platforms and asset classes such as cryptocurrency, Hynes said she thought the youngsters weren’t any less interested in investing than their forebears.
‘I actually don’t think there’s a generational gap in terms of interest,’ Hynes said, adding that ‘I suspect how we deliver those (products) to this generation will change. ... I think you have to make it really easy for this generation to be able to adapt.’
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Wellington CEO plans to stay above the M&A fray - Citywire USA
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