AssetCo chief executive Campbell Fleming has hopes for the asset management consolidator to reach assets of £75bn within two years, more than double the current level.
Fleming, a former head of sales at Aberdeen Asset Management, is chief executive of AssetCo, a business backed by industry heavyweights including Martin Gilbert, who chairs the company and Christopher Mills, its largest shareholder.
The company has grown from a cash shell to a £30bn AUM firm via a spree of acquisitions over the past couple of years, including fund house River and Mercantile, and the Parmenion platform.
Fleming said: “If we can grow it [AUM] to £75bn within a year or two, then I will be happy.”
While acquisitions will be a major part of this expansion, Fleming anticipates that helping acquired companies grow their assets will also play a key role, using his experience and connections from his days at Aberdeen, and before that as EMEA chief executive at Columbia Threadneedle.
AssetCo has a small number of direct employees, as other employees continue to work under the acquired companies.
Fleming said his and his colleague's salaries are “modest”, but are boosted by share options.
He said this approach aligns the interests of AssetCo’s management with those of the firms they acquire, as “most of the acquisitions we do will be funded using paper (Asset Co shares), rather than cash".
At the company’s most recent AGM, shareholders rebelled against the share options scheme of the management, and so it was re-constituted. Fleming described the new arrangements as “fair".
Fleming is a passionate believer in active investment management. He said: “When I was growing up, it was on the wrong side of the tracks in Queensland, Australia. I saw people made homeless as a result of having to pay funeral costs. Saving and investing can help with those costs."
He added: "People talk about the fees charged by active fund managers, well, the first unit trust I ever bought in the UK was in 1995, and I paid 5 per cent in the first year.
"No one pays that now, or anything like it. How many other products are cheaper in 2022 in Britain than they were in 1995? The costs of so many of the inputs, such as custody have fallen in that time.”
While committed to active management, AssetCo also owns the Rize ETF business.
Each of the firms acquired by AssetCo continue to trade under their individual brand names, and Fleming described himself as “agnostic” about any potential new brand being created to unify all of the acquired companies.
FTAdviser understands one option being considered is for the various equity businesses that AssetCo acquires to unite as one brand, while the platform, real assets and ETF businesses will retain their own branding.
In that scenario, AssetCo would likely remain as a holding company.
david.thorpe@ft.com
