Mike Freno, Chairman and CEO of Barings, discusses with Ted Seides how he balances strategic long-term firm building against day-to-day investment opportunities.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I've always viewed management's job. So my job now to really live in the future. What is going to allow us five years from now to be as well positioned as we are today. But what we're doing today in the success we're having today was really a result of what was done five plus years before that. If you're managing portfolios and our portfolio managers, they've got to be looking day to day on those types of things. That's a different mentality. From taking the longer term, but that's where the management side of things has to stay.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mike Freno
Opinion
Freno: Mutual ownership is among the best asset management structures
“I think it is one of the best, if not the best, ownership structures.”
Mike FrenoMar 14, 2024▶ 9:55Mike Freno – Confident Humility at Barings (EP.374)
Insight
Freno: Specialist sales forces make operating leverage impossible in global asset management
“We run a general sales force, which I believe is the right way to really get proper scale. We challenge ourselves all the time. Is having a specialist sales force the right way to go? Just very difficult to get operating leverage in that scale if you're doing …”
Mike FrenoMar 14, 2024▶ 23:12Mike Freno – Confident Humility at Barings (EP.374)
Insight
Freno: Business models dictate scale more than AUM dollar amounts
“My approach to that is I think business model dictates what the definition of scale is more than AUM and dollar amount. You could have a trillion dollars and that's not enough scale, or you could have fifty billion and have plenty of scale. So your business mo…”
Mike FrenoMar 14, 2024▶ 30:08Mike Freno – Confident Humility at Barings (EP.374)
Disclosure
Freno: Barings rejects the star portfolio manager model across all products
“We run everything as a team-based approach. We have investment committees for all of our products. We don't have the star portfolio manager that a business is built solely around.”
Mike FrenoMar 14, 2024▶ 13:48Mike Freno – Confident Humility at Barings (EP.374)
Insight
Freno: Asset management has discounted the importance of technology and operations
“I think one thing that asset management as an industry has discounted is the importance of building up your operations, investing in your technology, making sure the plumbing works all the time.”
Mike FrenoMar 14, 2024▶ 14:15Mike Freno – Confident Humility at Barings (EP.374)
Insight
Freno: Lack of organizational transparency breeds anxiety and degrades trust
“I always felt early in my career, I would rather know something and know I don't like it than not know something and think I don't like it. And that just breeds anxiety into the organization. It reduces trust. And we want to give people information. If you can…”
Mike FrenoMar 14, 2024▶ 16:21Mike Freno – Confident Humility at Barings (EP.374)
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 700 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.