Attracting Talent to the Frontiers of Finance

Abstract

A growing number of public pensions and sovereign funds located in regions without a history of financial services are making direct investments that bypass traditional financial intermediaries. It seems the world’s financial center of gravity is shifting away from the traditional financial hubs, such as London, New York and Tokyo, to cities at the frontiers of financial markets. Significantly, this new geography of finance and investment offers some unique opportunities for these investors to leverage their organizational endowments (e.g., scale, time horizon, certainty of capital, etc.) through creative capital deployments (e.g., in-house management, seeding new managers, etc.). However, it also creates a variety of new challenges. For example, how do public pension and sovereign funds set up world-class investment organizations out on the frontiers of finance? More specifically, how do these funds attract the talented investment staff they require to implement a sophisticated investment strategy that combines both in-house and external mandates? In this brief white paper, we highlight how certain public pension and sovereign funds are attracting the necessary human resources. We focus, in particular, on the recruitment of the organization’s leaders, both current and future, within the investment departments.