The job titles may be the same, but for Premier Miton’s chief investment officer Neil Birrell, the role of a fund manager and CIO has evolved into something very different in the course of two decades.
“What I do today is very, very different from what I did when I was doing almost the exact same role, in another organisation, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Not necessarily worse or better, but very different.
“One thing is: the access to information of all sorts, in all ways, is instant. I can wake up in the morning, and first thing you do is pick up your phone and go onto Bloomberg. At seven o'clock I'll be sat at my desk and I can see, just like everyone else around the world, what UK GDP or inflation was last month.
“Rather than everyone crowding around the one Reuters screen in the office to see what nonfarm payrolls are, everyone's got it on their phone straight away. I think that's part of the reason you see such volatility in markets as well, because it will trigger an algorithm somewhere that will start trading.”
Another change the asset management industry is currently undergoing, and which it has undergone before, is consolidation.
In January, Premier Miton announced it had completed its acquisition of Tellworth Investments, which Birrell describes as a “small version” of the merger between Premier and Miton in 2019.
Scale, he says, has become all the more relevant in Premier Miton’s area of the industry.
“For businesses like ours and our peers, we're coming off the back of two of the worst years in fund sales ever. And what that does is create stresses and strains within businesses.
“You've got to be very well financed in order to deal with that type of situation. And clearly some businesses are better financed than others.
“Some are stronger than others, and you've got to have a diversified fund base in order to deal with all that. We've got bond funds and money market funds, so that diverse product range has helped significantly.
“I think also what you're getting is increasing regulatory requirements. Consumer duty is clearly a very key one in all that.
“So modern day fund management businesses have an awful lot more to them than just managing funds, and being able to deal with all that is very important.
"So if you haven't got a diverse enough fund base, or your performance tails off and you’re losing key clients, then this industry can be a pretty brutal place, coming off the back of what we've seen in fund sales for 2022 and 2023.
“The pressures have gotten greater, and there are more of them; and therefore it puts small independent businesses in a difficult place. There's a lot of smaller fund management businesses around at the moment that are potentially looking for a new home.”
Like other asset managers, Premier Miton has experienced outflows, with the net figure at £1,147mn for the year ending September 30 2023, up from £1,076mn in 2022.
