Why your super-rich fund manager is facing oblivion

“It’s been tough for the industry to remain relevant through all the change,” says Martin Gilbert, who founded Aberdeen Asset Management and guided it through several transformative mergers before stepping back in 2019 after nearly four decades. But that wasn’t even the worst of it: within days the talks collapsed and the US business revealed it had only really wanted to get its hands on SG Warburg’s asset management business. A few years ago, one former employee told me: “Asset management was where you were sent if you failed in corporate finance.” To distance itself, SG Warburg renamed its fund arm Mercury Asset Management and floated a quarter of the business in 1987. In 1995, SG Warburg was bought by Swiss Bank Corporation, starting the slow subsumption into what became UBS and allowing Mercury Asset Management to gain full independence. Toby Nangle, a former fund manager himself and now an independent financial markets commentator, remembers Sir Clive Thompson, the father of one of his university friends and the longtime boss of Rentokil, excitedly telling him about meeting Chris Poil, the head of UK equities at Baring Asset Management: “That was how it was back then: Footsie chief executives were starstruck by equities managers.” Industry in crisis How the mighty have fallen.