Interview – Border to Coast
INTERVIEW – DANIEL BOOTH
“It is not every day that you get to build a £55bn asset manager from scratch.”
Border to Coast’s chief investment officer tells Andrew Holt about change management, building trust, taking the expensive option, the next big thing in China and his concerns with ESG data.
What was at the top of your in-tray when you became chief investment officer three years ago? The key for me, as well as building rela- tionships with the team, was making sure we had the right supporting resources, so building out our research and risk func- tions. That meant building a dedicated team of research professionals. Building that functionality allowed [the funds] to take bigger positions and be more active with their risk expression. And, consequently, have more quantita- tive support on portfolio construction, risk management and understanding the exposures.
I was also focused on getting our alterna- tives platform up and running as soon as possible. That will have material cost sav- ings for our partner funds of about £12m a year.
12 | portfolio institutional | November 2021 | issue 108
Even more interesting than smaller fees for the alternatives platform, is giving our partner funds access to a global range of strategies and geographies that they could not invest in before. They did not have the teams, especially the smaller funds, to bypass the fund of funds and negotiate fees directly. Hiring has also been big. In 2018, we had only 15 staff who had transferred from our partner funds to set up Border to Coast. In three years, we have grown to around 100 employees, with about 50 on the investment side. So, we have built the team and supplemented our resources. There has been a
lot of stakeholder
engagement with our partner funds. Pool- ing is a big change management pro- gramme requiring a lot of trust and build- ing relationships. So, the executives at Border to Coast, including myself, have
done a lot of travelling to see pension committees and meet the officers. A lot of engagement has been involved.
Where are you with the alternatives platform? We have raised almost £6bn, which is about twice what we expected. About £4bn of that has been deployed, so we have been pretty busy. It will be fully com- mitted by next spring.
Infrastructure, private credit and private equity are the three main sleeves. Within that we are covering all sub strategies and geographies: so, we have Chinese health- care and Brazilian infrastructure – things our partner funds could not have done by themselves.
Why did you leave Aramco to join Border to Coast?
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