Asset Manager

“We're looking at that with Asset managers who can be more nimble, which means they have to be size constrained. That's been a big area of focus for us over the last couple years.”

“Leadership transition is the Achilles heel of an alternative, of any asset manager, in my opinion.”

“Asset managers are less heavily regulated compared to banks, and so they tend to be leading when it comes to adopting new tools because it can make a real difference. They are always trying to create that little bit of alpha, because they manage assets on beha…”

“I do not think there's going to be some calamity. The structure that the asset managers are using is just much better than what the banks used to use. You know, borrow short, lend long. So these are very long dated structures, which is great. You can work thro…”

“Every incentive today is to Enter preservation mode, become benchmark hog, coast on the brand, and now it's really about staying true to who we are, and being different, and getting better, and serving others.”

“One is you can have these asset managers use their existing target date funds and add alternatives to them. I personally think that's highly unlikely, and as a matter of fact, as you talk in the industry, it's pretty apparent that that's not the avenue.”

“I think that if you manage money for other people, you're deeply arrogant if you are going to apply your ethical framework onto The way that you invest.”

“We very deliberately went after asset managers as our early customers, why they're more progressive. They want to make more money. They're earlier adopters of technology and have less regulation to deal with, say, compared to banks, which just have, it's more …”

“At some sense, at some scale, you just become an asset manager and really what you're looking for are you know, different fee paying products basically.”

“We built a database of probably now 1500 conferences all over the world that we track according to four criteria for asset managers.”

“You're starting to see consolidation. We just put out a conversation about consolidation on the allocator side. There's certainly a lot more of that happening on the manager side as well.”

“We have more products than the average asset manager. We have about 250 products and with 60 teams.”

“My biggest pet peeve in the industry is when a manager shows me a pitch book with an upside down triangle with an investment universe at the top and a portfolio at the bottom. I'm sure you've seen a thousand of them as well. And then they proudly claim that wh…”

“All asset managers will have to become platform companies, right? Investment advice will no longer be delivered through people and investment products. It will be delivered through platform in a personalized way at scale for Every single investor.”

“If you're responsible for other people's money, you say what you do, and then you do what you say. Managing other people's money is not the time to figure something out.”

“An asset manager is someone who generates returns in order to justify their fees. Jessica Lessin: It's a fee game. Sam Lessin: An investor is someone who takes fees because they have to support their team in order to generate returns. They're getting paid on t…”

“Insurance companies have an existential need for asset management capabilities. So there is a symbiotic relationship between the two because they take their premiums in and they need to invest those prudently to be able to not only meet the claims, but hopeful…”

“I would say the pension space doesn't quite pay at the same level as some of those areas, but it's not too far off.”

“Broadly across the United States and wealth management, no one really knows any of the names of the asset managers. So there really is no brand recognition really even at the top.”

“And so every asset manager is going to come compete in space. Because it's not about they like tech or they think tech's interesting. It's just a good business now to be investing behind.”

“What I found on the investing side was on top of those challenges that come with growth, I felt the structure as it related to their investors was fundamentally misaligned from day one. I think that's no secret. There's dynamics that over time make the GP and …”

“If you want to own your own business, it's very tough to hang a shingle now and say, hi, I'm Dineker saying I'm Eric Midnich, give me five billion dollars. Those days are pretty numbered. There's very few people that can do that.”

“We don't sit on those investment committees by and large. We do help them any way they want us to help them, and that's been a very successful strategy.”

“I think my biggest investment pet peeve is one, when you have a conversation with a manager about alignment, And they try to pretend that they either don't understand it or that they are aligned. You know when you're not aligned. You know when you're propos…”

“I think every one of my investment bad mistakes are things where there was something about it that wasn't quite right, but I thought they just need to be shown the way and they will change that thing. People only change when they want to change. You can't ma…”

“The information asymmetry, as well as the experience asymmetry, our expertise asymmetry, we really cannot make the effective monitoring of asset managers, because they are much more sophisticated, much more informed.”

“As a part of this new fee proposal, we also told the managers that from then on, we only retain the asset managers Who we are convinced to give them like a five-year or like a multi-year contract. We are not going to put the managers in a situation like their …”

“A lot of asset managers keep telling us, we do this much analysis on ESG, and we do this much analysis on this, and we hire this, we buy this information set, and I said, and in the end I said, how do you use it for investment decision making? And then a lot o…”

“We founded Volery to make private equity investments that generate positive social or environmental impact. And we quickly decided to focus on asset managers.”

“If we target the asset owners, if we regulate the asset owners, and we say, you have to consider ESG consideration, As part of your fiduciary duty or some version of that, then the asset owners push the asset managers and the asset managers push the companies …”

“Most asset managers haven't got that granularity yet, and they are confronted with all this technology they have, right? You can get satellite data on, on Walmart's parking lot, but I still can't figure out if Paula Valente is reading my piece of thought leade…”

“For someone to actually figure out a mechanism that an asset manager can produce meaningful content and know when clients and potential clients are engaging with it and how is very much the holy grail of asset management marketing because then it's just going …”

“The firms that over-communicate during crises are the ones that have the sticky assets.”

“There's 500 large asset managers, you know, you've got about a thousand hedge funds, you've got quite a few investment banks, you know, about 2000.”

“If you've got a bunch of different mandates, and you've got a fund, for example, and you find an asset, you've then got to say, okay, well, I'm going to give three bits to the fund, and one bit to this mandate, you know. That sort of allocation infrastructure,…”

“We think about the 10,000 plus managers that are out there. There's a few percent that actually merit any of the capital of our clients and asset owners.”

“If there's poor performance, alarm bells come up and down the chain and the committee doesn't say like, Let's do nothing. They always say, like, we should do something, right? So this notion, and by the way, I think it's a Western thing, maybe an American thin…”

“You don't actually have to like the people that manage our money. They just have to make us money. In fact, if we don't like them, it's a little bit easier because we're a little bit more objective”

“Typically what happens is that money goes from a saver to a big asset owner, like a pension plan or an endowment or a sovereign wealth fund, to an asset manager through the publicly traded capital markets into a publicly listed company. In that process, that l…”

“You know, the further down the value chain you get in asset management, in my view, sort of, not asset management, financial services. You have asset allocators on the end. They're the nicest group. And then within that group, probably corporate funds are the …”

“You know, asset managers would love seed capital from Yale, and we're willing to give up a lot to get it, because of what it tells the market for the next fund.”

“Again, very much ballparking. I'd say 30% of the asset managers actually changed the way they did business. The other 70% just pretended to change the way they do business.”

“Underlying that all is the people who are going to be successful going back are the people who, Are actually thinking long-term, are actually trying to use their size to almost bully the asset manager into giving them what they want, a true solution. Those are…”

“No asset manager thinks they're bad at client service, but when you pull asset owners, and we have formally pulled them, 80% of asset managers have poor client service.”

“This is a sort of the case with all basically online financial marketplaces. They start off as pure marketplace and then effectively move over to be more of an asset manager or online venture capital firm or private equity firm or online kind of lender.”