Four years ago, Mark Versey became the CEO of Aviva Investors, having previously been chief investment officer of the firm’s real assets business.
As soon as he took over the helm of the company which, to date, runs £238bn of assets, he embarked on a significant efficiency drive.
“Aviva had sold its French life insurance business, meaning we had to extract a very big mandate out of the company,” he tells Portfolio Adviser. “So, I set about outsourcing the middle- and back-office operations in both liquid and private markets, as well as some other non-core activities such as stock-lending.
“We’re now at a point where we’re really scalable. We have turned the business around, we know exactly what we stand for. And now, other asset managers are looking at costs and having to implement these efficiency drives. So, it feels like we are ahead of the curve.”
Versey is well-acquainted with joining firms during periods of significant change. On his first day as chief investment officer at Axa UK in 2008 – and in his first-ever CIO role – Lehman Brothers collapsed.
During his time as an M&A specialist actuarial consultant in the late ’90s, his first job in the City, he was assigned to the Scottish Widows/Lloyds deal, whereby the former demutualised and became part of the Lloyds TSB Marketing Group.
And now, after a period of transformation for Aviva Investors, he is excited to continue to grow and adapt the business.
“This year in particular, we have moved away from our efficiency work,” he says. “We have transformed our front-office and distribution teams, and we have powered up our fixed-income business through the hire of [former Federated Hermes fixed-income head] Fraser Lundie.
“We have been building our quant capabilities,” he adds. “We have brought private equity and venture capital skill into our newly-named Private Markets business, which was formerly called our Real Assets business.
“Our distribution arm in particular has been transformed and we have moved the client-facing proportion of the distribution function from 30% to 65%. [Global head of distribution] Jill Barber has really changed how we focus the business and become more client-led.
“We’ve been very busy but in a really exciting way. We are now operating on a real growth agenda.”
In terms of the fixed-income arm of the business, Versey believes the company has the bandwidth and the capability to build this out significantly.
“Because we run insurance company money, which has a lot of liability matching, we have huge scale in fixed income, but it’s not something we have really externalised to anywhere near the extent we should have done. This is the focus around bringing Fraser in,” he explains.
Read the rest of this article in the January issue of Portfolio Adviser magazine