Firms assembled their solutions businesses, so they assembled the people running them too. Few of those leaders set out to do this job, because the job did not exist when they started. Map the leadership across the large managers and the same three backgrounds keep appearing. The proportions differ by firm, and they say a good deal about what each one thinks it is building.
One route is the portfolio manager who ran balanced or asset allocation mandates and grew as clients asked for more. Another belongs to the consultant or asset owner professional who crossed over from the buying side, and who knows what the client is being asked by its own board. Models that became the product bring the third kind, the quantitative researcher. Each background carries a real strength and a predictable gap with it. The portfolio manager has the trust of the investment floor, and can be slow with clients who want an answer today. The consultant holds the relationship, and can find it hard to carry authority over a team of portfolio managers. The researcher builds something properly differentiated, then needs a commercial partner alongside to sell it.
For a firm hiring one, the useful question is which gap it can live with, and that depends on what the business already has around it. A solutions unit inside a strong distribution organization can carry an investor who is weak commercially. It does not work the other way round when the unit has to win its own mandates. We also watch firms hire for the route they wish they had taken. That produces a leader who spends two years arguing for a strategy the firm was not going to fund. One further effect is worth knowing about. Where a leader came from predicts the shape of the team they go on to build, and that outlasts the appointment.
What the full report contains
The full report maps the leadership of the solutions businesses at the major managers. Each entry records the route that leader took and how they have built the team beneath them. Across the peer set, that pattern says where these businesses are heading.