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I wonder if ______ is an extremely optimistic person or in a cocoon of senior management denial

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November 2001

Live flesh show





Michael Dobson should have an interesting time turning around Schroders.
At least having been a non-executive director of the firm, the former Deutsche Asset Management boss has a pretty good idea of what he's letting himself in for.
One of the first headaches he may have to deal with, though, is in the back office - not somewhere this most suave of City characters would necessarily spend much of his time. However a legacy of his predecessor David Salisbury is the outsourcing contract with Chase's old custody division, now JPMorgan Investor Services.
Outsourcing the back-office was supposed to free up the investment staff to concentrate on what they're good at: investing and gathering assets. Outsourcing has been a buzzword in fund management for some time and the JPMorgan deal made a big splash when it was announced last year.
However, it seems not all is going to plan. A source familiar with the deal says it could be another three years before it starts to deliver. Schroders hopes to save some £15 million a year of the £60 million it spends on this part of the business. Not huge sums maybe but enough to make Dobson's job a little harder.
Schroders declines to comment but David Gilks, senior vice-president at JPMorgan, concedes: "The development is taking longer than we expected."Sick of all the mathematical equations and gobbledegook that pervade finance? Then find out when Karl Sternberg is next speaking and pop along to listen.
The chief investment officer for global equities at Deutsche Asset Management has a refreshing approach to fund management, and a, well let's just say unique, turn of phrase.
Take a speech he just gave to Australian pension funds in Cairns, called: "Putting the flesh back into fund management". After a couple of funny stories to start off, he launched into his theme: "The great problem for a speechwriter is that finance has become incredibly dull. It used to be fun. It stopped being fun when it was turned into a science; when it was hijacked by mathematics; when it was given spurious accuracy by making it a series of equations."
See? You're waking up already. His speech, he continued, was "a plea to put the flesh back into finance".
And he found an eye-catching, or should that be ear-catching, way to demonstrate what he meant by offering a perspective on the differences between the main types of financial markets players:
"Fund management is an odd part of the financial services industry. No other financial business would open itself to external scrutiny in the way that we do. It makes sense, I suppose, because we enter into a relationship of trust with clients. Fund managers are the sort of people who go out with someone, propose, get engaged, get married, have children. Corporate financiers: they tell you they love you, whisk you off to bed for a night of passion; and in the morning they can't even remember your name. And stockbrokers: well, stockbroking is a quick blow job up an alleyway; and they don't even ask your name."
Not all the speech was so flippant. But there was still time for a little humour at the end, as he left with the words "this piece of tired flesh is off to the bar".







Correa won his election on a populist mandate and so every time he seizes assets from a big company or threatens to not pay external debt, he wins votes

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