When a big sovereign client invited Man Group, the world’s biggest listed hedge fund, to speak at its London offsite earlier this year, Man sent along its president, one of its chief investment officers and its chief technology officer.
The president, Steven Desmyter, spoke for about 5% of the time. The chief technology officer, Gary Collier, spoke for the other 95%. The client, a key investor with Man, asked all sorts of structural questions such as what was the company’s approach to outsourcing and what its experience was of pay competition versus the technology world?
“These are not conversations that you used to have with an asset allocator 10 years ago,” says Desmyter now. “But they are commonplace today.”
Go back that far and it is unlikely that Man would even have sent a CTO along to such a meeting. Man today has a specific reputation for being particularly technology-driven, so questions on that topic are to be expected. After all, the hedge fund spent about $600 million on technology in the last five years alone, and almost half of its roughly 1,800 people are quants and technologists.
But even so, for Desmyter, the story is an illustration of just how relationships have changed.