Part 2: Jean Hynes looks back on her journey and where Wellington is headed in the future

Wellington Management CEO Jean Hynes sat down with Pensions & Investments to talk about her journey to becoming the first woman chief executive at the $1.1 trillion money manager and where the firm is looking to expand in the coming years.Questions and answers have been edited for style, clarity and conciseness.

A: I started at Wellington right from undergrad at Wellesley College. My parents are immigrants, my father was a bricklayer. We did not talk about stocks at our dinner table. And towards the end of my time at Wellesley, I had to get an internship, and that was my first introduction into finance. From there I could identify, I was really interested in research and why the stocks moved, and I found my way to Wellington. I started at Wellington at the very bottom. I was a administrative assistant in the research department. Wellington was very small then, 275 employees when I started, and $60 billion in assets under management. (Wellington had 3,416 employees as of June 30.)

A recruiter told me, "don't worry about the title, you're going to be with amazing people. This culture is so unique, you should just go." People talk a lot about culture, but the culture of Wellington was unique and it really was a competitive edge. A year in, I got to start working with Ed Owens, who was my mentor for 20 years. He's probably one of the best investors there has ever been in terms of his long-term record. I got opportunities to run money. And for 30 years of investing, I've had a very fulfilling career.

In 2014, I became a managing partner at Wellington, a private partnership. It's another one of our edges. There are three managing partners responsible for the governance of the partnership. That means it's a lot about talent, promotions and how you split the profits of the firm based on merit. In 2014, I thought I had the best of all worlds. I was managing long/short, long only. And I was also a managing partner.And I had no aspiration of thinking I could be CEO or wanting to be CEO. Working very closely with our previous CEO, Brendan Swords, just gave me a right-hand seat at how he operated and what a CEO did every day. And so slowly it was like, well, I could do it. And then the question really was how did I want to spend the rest of my career at Wellington? Plus or minus 40 years at Wellington when I retire, well, how did I want to give back because Wellington has given me so much?

A: I have four daughters, so the advice I give my daughters and a lot of people that I interact with at Wellington: You should be constantly growing. How do you grow every single year and learn new skills? You can never stop. And I had great role models like my parents always constantly learning. And so that would be No. 1, because as you learn, then new opportunities emerge. The second thing is you have to find work that really energizes you because the more you're energized, the more likely you're going to have impacts.

A: Back in 2020 when it was announced that I was CEO, we also went down the road of continuing to manage one fund. The Vanguard Healthcare Fund, it's a very large fund, low turnover. I'm a low-turnover investor. If I was a very high-turnover investor, it probably wouldn't be conducive to being both a portfolio manager and being a CEO. I think a number of things worked to say having a CEO that's also managing money.

And so in order to make it happen, we needed a few things. We have a president who's an active president for the first time. So my partner Steve Klar enabled me to manage money. And then we also had a health-care team that was mature and ready to take on a lot more responsibility. And so it's been great to watch the health-care team continue to excel and the better they are, I'm able to leverage them in ways I wasn't able to three years ago.

A: We'll be more global. We have some excellent investors around the globe, so growing their businesses so that they become much bigger businesses, that's one of my most very important goals. We'll have more capabilities in privates. So if we have five teams now, by the end of the decade we will have 10. If we can continue to find those adjacencies, we've built the infrastructure now to do more on the private side.

We've been a long/short hedge fund investor since 1994. We're in the process of making that good to great in terms of capability. So at the end of the decade, will we have a really strong macro credit and equity long/short business? And then can we put that together in a way, combine those strategies in ways that really provide custom solutions to clients? And if we can get all that right that, we should be really be able to help our clients because that's very diversifying.

A: The biggest two trends in the last decade have been the move to passive and the move to alternatives — private credit, private equity. So those markets have really grown quite a bit. What we hear from clients is the allocations to privates will continue. We are investing, and our clients are asking; those are not as high-capacity strategies as public equity or public fixed-income markets. So yes, we hear from clients that they're likely to allocate more. How can we co-create some products together? Can our capabilities fit with what your needs are? Can we have co-investments? So those are areas that we're having more and more of those discussions.

A: Some people know, but not everyone, is that we were once a public mutual fund company. So Wellington Management Co. was incorporated in 1928, so we're almost 100 years old. But the private partnership part of Wellington started in 1979 (and was formed out of crisis — the separation of one firm into what became Wellington and Vanguard in the mid-70s). In the '70s there was a split of management. And because of that split, Wellington went on to become very investment content focused. And then Vanguard was created. And so you can imagine the CEO of Vanguard, Tim Buckley, and I often say it would be a great story to tell how two companies formed at a crisis and how successful they've both been doing very different things.

From that crisis we took the company private. Because of that, the early founders focused on culture significantly. So I think we started focusing on culture decades ahead of when it became necessary to focus. Companies have learned culture is the secret weapon — especially during COVID. We had 29 founding partners who mortgaged houses to take the company private. The stock price (in the '70s) was so low, we probably would never be able to do it today.