The idea of culture and brand
Good performance on its own is not enough to entice investors anymore. Performance can be ‘good’ but it can also hide a lot of things, including bad investment decision making.
Increasingly so, investors want to understand how an investment company has integrity and strong values embedded into its teams and work processes, to ensure the longevity of outperformance.
“Lots of managers have good performance. What investors want to know is what has driven that good performance and what is going to make that good performance sustainable going forward. Not just what is done, but how it is done,” said Debbie Clarke, former global head of funds research at Mercer and member of the ACT Stewardship Council, speaking at a recent City Hive and Invesco event.
Debbie adds a company’s culture is integral to the values it holds, and throughout her 40-year investment career has always been an important consideration.
“I’ve always believed in culture. Asset management is a people business, so the culture of those people is key.
“Culture is what defines your organisation, it is who you are to the outside world. It is what you want to be seen as. It is created by the people you have working at the organisation.
“Do you keep your staff? Do you deliver for clients? Is it a place with integrity? Does it invest in people in terms of personal development? It’s very important to have your culture well defined and that becomes your brand.”
Strong values at a firm need to be fed through at all levels, not just be a handful of individuals or certain teams.
“You can have a potentially strong bottom-up culture but actually you need strong leadership to pull that culture through the organisation, to have the right time frames, the right incentives,” Debbie said.
“Sometimes that does get lost in the day-to-day running of the business, but you need to focus on demonstrating the company has that positive culture and has that integrity. It needs to stay front of mind.”
Investment managers need to consider how they assess good practice in terms of governance in culture internally and externally. For example, Stephanie Butcher, co-head of investments at Invesco, said she is keen to create an environment where teams are comfortable and feel heard but also challenged, and therefore get the right results for clients, when looking internally.
“We want to have the best portfolios and the best results for clients and to do that a lot of it is about healthy challenge and debate - at the root of that is to have a good culture. If you don’t have trust and respect, you can’t have that challenging debate. It is fundamental to how you’re running money.”
This is also applied when assessing external investments as Stephanie added a lot of time is spent meeting people at different levels in the company when they are carrying out their research and after investing, from the CEO to a junior, to understand the culture.
“One has to be naturally sceptical; it can be easy to tell a good story but it’s how people reflect it. If you spend more time with different divisions, you can start to see evidence linking to those points and you think this now adds up. Whereas in meetings you can be siloed, and that is a sign the culture isn’t quite as integrated as you’d like to think.
“Also, how people act when things go wrong can tell you so much. How did they deal with their clients? Their employees? These are all signals.”
Debbie Clarke, former global head of funds research at Mercer and member of the ACT Stewardship Council, echoed this: “Investors want to see their fund managers be motivated to be at work and to act with integrity. That comes from a good culture.”
For more on the ACT Framework, click here.