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Steen Foldberg talks about recruitment and retention following the merger of Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life Investments, in the face of Brexit, and in the increasingly competitive asset management jobs market.
APRIL/MAY 2019
The war for talent interview
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teen Foldberg is probably one of the few bosses that gave one-fifth of his staff a 5%-25% raise without them asking. That’s part of what the managing director of Aberdeen Standard Investments in Luxembourg considers treating employees “fairly”. He spoke with Delano in February. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Is there a war for talent in the funds industry?
aaron grunwald
I think the starting point is always to look for the signs of a war. I think that the signs are when you see increasing salaries, when you see that you have open positions longer, when you have fewer candidates applying for jobs, then you start to realise that there is a war for talent going on. This is also something that we, as an organisation, have experienced. And just before we met, I took a steen foldberg
Aaron Grunwald
Funds
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Mike Zenari
look [at online job boards and] right now there are 325 open positions in the compliance space, 225 senior finance positions, 150 in risk management and nearly 100 in fund accounting. So I think that when we talk about war for talent, then these numbers say it all. It’s been about a year and a half since the merger. How have things changed in the Luxembourg office?
One of the main measurements is, of course, assets under management, and that grew from €56bn before we started our project to €92bn [at the end of 2018]. Then, on top of that, due to the fact that the combined company doubled and in the Brexit context, new funds are being launched in Luxembourg. So we now have a larger distribution [network] that is requesting us to launch new funds. [We have also diversified] into alternative invest-
ment funds. So we have a big pipeline of products. As a consequence of the merger and the trend to have more alternative investment, we have recently been granted a licence to do private equity investment and also infrastructure, which is new. You’re about 50 people now. Are you planning to grow?
We’re actually here on 19 February and we have officially closed our Brexit project. It’s completed. So that’s obviously something that I’m extremely proud about. And I think that the next exercise that we have to do is that we are going to streamline our suppliers and we’re going to optimise the workflow that we have. We’re also going to have a fund rationalisation, as two companies are coming together. And then we need to rightsize the team to meet those requirements. If we look at, in particular, where we still have open gaps, where →