Fred Bisset

Few native Londoners can know the area of St James’s near Buckingham Palace as well as Connecticut-based . Immaculately dressed in pinstripe suit complete with handkerchief and poppy for Remembrance Day, Bisset has an intimate knowledge of the alleyways and back streets that wind their way around buildings such as the Ritz and take us to our lunch venue. And because it’s a short cut, there’s plenty of time to stop along the way and look at the paintings on show in the windows of Sotheby’s and several high-class art dealers.

Bisset, who is president and CEO of AG Bisset&Co, is clearly a man of taste. After all, if you’re thinking of getting to know an area of London, St James’s – often frequented by royals – isn’t a bad choice.

He’s also a man of many titles, so many that at first he doesn’t remember them all.

True to his Scottish ancestry, Bisset is president of the Burns Society in New York, a member of the St Andrews Society, and also honorary corresponding secretary of St James’s club the Royal Over-Seas League, though he admits he isn’t quite sure what the latter position actually means.

In financial circles, he is known as the boss of the currency-overlay boutique he founded in the early 1980s. After 21 years in the business, his tireless enthusiasm for overlay’s ever-unrealized potential is impressive. The motto of the company that adorns its crest (yes, crest) translates from the Latin as “If pruned, it will always grow green”.

Bisset has even been known to add a touch of colour to his thoughts on currency overlay by paraphrasing French writer Victor Hugo: “There’s nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

An overlay pioneer
AG Bisset, which now has $2 billion of assets under management, began as a currency advisory firm in 1981. It later put its, or rather its clients’, money where its mouth was and moved into currency management. It took its first overlay mandate in 1988 for $35 million, when – and here comes another of Bisset’s favourite phrases – it “decided to take the cork out of the bottle and drink the champagne”. Whether currency overlay managers have had much to raise their glasses to in the past 15 years is debatable. It’s certainly not a large part of the overall market. Of the $5.4 trillion comprising the world’s total pension fund assets in December 2001, only about $110 billion is dedicated to currency overlay strategies. And AG Bisset has just $2 billion of that.

Though Bisset has been involved in currency overlay since the industry’s beginnings, he has no aspirations to rival in size such operations as JPMorgan Fleming or Pareto Partners. He would like to take a larger slice of the overlay market as it grows but admits it’s unlikely that a firm the size of his is ever going to manage 10 times what it does now. That would eat into his free time, and with a wife (who is also vice-president and treasurer of AG Bisset), five children and grandchildren in tow, that probably wouldn’t be taken lightly.

Bisset is clear that his family and his business are his priorities, though he also finds the time to be a keen sailor. It’s with pride that he carries photos of his family in his inside pocket, and with enthusiasm that he shows off pictures of his boat, a starboard tender that sat on the side of John Piermont Morgan’s 345ft yacht in the 1920s.

And almost as if by coincidence Bisset crewed a winning boat in the America’s Cup Jubilee Regatta in Cowes on the south coast of the UK last year with Halsey Herreshoff, grandson of the man who built the original JP Morgan yacht.

Bisset, like many others in finance, is also an avid golfer, though he admits his handicap “isn’t what it used to be”. Earlier this year, in part in honour of his Scottish roots, he took charge of refurbishing “The Christening Box” at Winged Foot Golf Club in New York (venue of the 2006 US Open), where he is a member. This entailed preserving the neck of the original, pre-World War I Dewar’s Scotch whisky bottle, smashed in 1923 to commemorate the opening of the clubhouse.

When it comes to his heritage, Bisset knows where his priorities lie.