Meet Robyn Grew, first female CEO of Man Group

Robyn Grew's ascent to become the first woman CEO of Man Group, the world's largest publicly traded hedge fund manager, underscores the shift occurring on Wall Street. Grew comes from an unconventional background, as a qualified criminal barrister who attended Coventry University.

She's also spent the last decade-plus helping to build the future of Man with her colleagues in a collaborative fashion, unlike the top-down heavy style in the industry: "We have spent time and energy and effort in building a scalable alpha capture organization which is diversified," she said.Pensions & Investments sat down with Grew to talk about the biggest topics in institutional investing and hedge funds: Artificial Intelligence, private credit and how Grew got to the top spot. Questions and answers have been edited for style, clarity and conciseness.

A: It's a great question. And of course we're nowhere near through it. So let me start by saying I'm lucky to be in a position where this firm is in great shape. It's a great firm, it's doing great business. We have spent time and energy and effort in building a scalable alpha capture organization which is diversified. And I don't walk in as somebody brand new. So the first 100 days, in many ways, I have a head start because I've been at this firm for 14 years and been part of the senior management team and part of the strategy of the organization. But we're in a different time. Markets are in a different place.The last 10 years are going to look very different from the next 10 years, and so as I look at the organization, I'm surrounded by people who I have worked with for a very long time. Some of them I've worked with in other organizations before they got to Man Group. So I've got a really deep, strong and broad management team, and it's about making sure that we set the vision, set the direction, make sure that we point out the mountain we're going to climb, and that we are focused on delivering for our clients. First and foremost, that will never change at Man Group. This is a client business where we come into work every day to deliver for our clients, and my focus will be how do we do that? How do we do it better? What do I need to add to the diversification in our organization so that we can do a better job of capturing that and delivering it back to our clients?

A: So all of those things, you're absolutely right. Facing a different economic backdrop with inflation, with interest rates. I don't think this is a transitory inflation time. I don't think we're going to see the end of (higher) interest rates. And by the way, the last decade was the anomaly, not the norm, and I think that we are returning back into a space which is where we should see volatility in the market, where we're going to see that dispersion, and what clients are looking for is a review of their portfolios and an understanding of what do they need to do to navigate these waters. It is a trickier place.

Now, for an active asset manager, it's a great place for us to be. It's where we can lean in. Dispersion is good for us. It's good because we are skilled. It's good because we are diversified. It's good because we have been here for a long time and we have deep experience in this place. It's good because we have the ability to take data and analytics and put them to work. It's good because we are a hedge fund, but we're also long only. It's good because we are global. It's good for so many different reasons about how we navigate it.

But first and foremost, the conversations we're having with clients are ones where they're saying, "Come and talk to us. Come and understand our portfolio. Come and work with us on what we need to put in place." So rather than this being about a product-led thing, "Here you go. Buy this product that I've made," it's much more about us saying, "What do you need? How do we work with you? How do we put this together and how does it fulfill your needs? Let us work with you on that." So what we are seeing more and more is the content and the depth of those conversations are very real at the moment. More of the money we're being allocated is coming through solutions, and by that I mean are a customization of combinations of our products across our engines to answer those questions. And when we have the ability to provide solutions which are bespoke, when you have the ability to have overlays, hedges, changing of shop, changing of leverage, changing of volatility with that, you're answering a much more discrete set of problems, and that is important to us. The strategic relationship build, the answering real problems with real answers rather than forcing a square peg into the round-hole moment, that's something that we take pride in and it's something that we are honing and something that will continue to look for additional content to enhance the solutions we can provide. And that's going to be our driver through this. We've talked before, but ultimately, we're aligned with our allocators, we're aligned in working for real people underneath this, the teachers and the metal workers and the police, and I can go on and on and on, who have worked tirelessly actually, have saved diligently, have put away their money into their pension funds and are now entrusting the allocators and us with that.

A: Yep, exactly to the same point. It's that continuation of adding content and capability. There's no doubt that in this environment and as we see things play out over the next little while, we're going to see some real opportunities, I think, in credit and in the private credit space, but in credit more broadly, and Varagon plays absolutely into it being a solution for some clients who have real interest in directly investing in this space, but also as part of solutions, as part of an element or a sleeve or a book within a solution.

So again, it's a terrific business, culturally a great connection with us, literally 10 blocks south of the very office we're sitting in today, working with an extraordinary track record of their own depth of expertise. It speaks to excellence, which is something that we love at Man Group. We like that sense of being nerdy about what we do and doing it well. Varagon have a bit of that. I hope they forgive me in saying that out loud, but they absolutely do. And when you look at things like private credit and middle-market lending, you're looking at default rates and their track (record) is just extraordinary in that space. So you want to be working and we want to be working, bringing teams on board, looking at acquisitions, bringing individuals on board that adds to our content and our excellence. Varagon is part of that.

A: Where something works, where something is additive, where something connects with us culturally, where something answers a client solution, we'll be at the table.

A: Well, No. 1, let me say AI is not new. So we'll talk ChatGPT in a minute or in any version of that, but actually AI has been something we have put to work across the organization, and I've been working with for 10 years, 15 years. We use it in different places. We can use it in sentiment analysis, and we do, and we've used models and machine learning in model choices for execution styles, we use it within our quant spaces in modeling generally. Advancing technologies, we embrace them. We're not frightened by them at all. If it enables us to be smarter and better at what we do, then there's huge possibility and capability in it, and I think this is where ChatGPT or where any of these advances are happening, we are really interested in those.

We have a Chat Man version. You can't have a firm of quants and developers and techs and not have something for them to play with on this stuff, and they do. What's very interesting is being able to point it at the things that matter to you and understanding the information you're getting out of it. If you're not careful with tools, you'll find them producing results at the lowest common denominator. So if you ask — and actually a very good friend of mine used this just recently as an example — ChatGPT to tell you who the best French poet is, the thing about ChatGPT is it will try to tell you. Now, it's clearly a question that's almost impossible to answer, and I'm sure that your knowledge of French poets might not be very good, or mine isn't at least, but asking a question like that, which is the best whiskey, which is the best designer, which is the best poet, they're not questions that are able to be answered in the absolute. They're not binary questions.

And when you use tools like this, you've got to know what you're pointing at, you've got to know the question you are asking, and you've got to know what the content is that comes back, and you need to understand whether that's valuable to you.

So being able to use these tools to further what we do, we're really excited about. So if it gets us to research quicker, if it gets us to markets quicker, if it gets us to content and data sources better, if we can look for alpha more creatively, terrific. I have a firm full of people who can take that data, who understand the question they're asking, who can look at the results that they get back and where we can deploy and have value.There's a danger that people think that all active managers are created equal, that if markets work in a certain way, everybody returns money. That's not what happens. You still need skill, you still need capability, you still need the investment in tech, you still need the investment in the best people out there, and that's what we deploy in the organization, and we deploy that with technologies, too. So we're not fighting about them, we're excited about them, but we are also very, very thoughtful about how we use them, how we deploy them, how we check them, and how we integrate them into us being, I'm going to say it again, better at what we do every day. What we do every day is come in and return value to our clients.

A: My view is yes, but I sit in a position where I have an incredibly strong quantum tech firm, and that gives me an advantage. I think the other thing is we spent the last decade investing in not just the quant and the tech, and not just the execution skills that we have, but we've put tech to work through our organization. So when I talk about alpha and alpha generation, I also think about it in terms of generating it, finding it, but also keeping it. So don't give alpha away in your execution style. Have alpha in the way that you look at your operations processes.

We are constantly ensuring that the people at Man Group are about finding, keeping bettering our processes through alpha, that alpha piece, and the commoditized piece, that can go somewhere else and we'll run it, but we don't think about tech as something that sits at the front. We think about tech as enabling the entire organization. So when we talked earlier about solutions, you can't do that, you can't deliver solutions at scale across multiple engines, different parts of Man Group without having the infrastructure that supports that and enables that to run smoothly.

I use this analogy from time to time, the analogy of Formula 1, and many years ago when I was young, and so dinosaurs were roaming the world, but there was still Formula 1, it was all about the drivers. They had the big names and they were the people who made the difference. When we see Formula 1 (now), you see a thousand people in the McLaren pit or 1,001 people in the Ferrari, whatever it may be. It's about the computer analytics, it's about the weight of the chassis, it's about the fuel injection, it's about the speed of that fuel injection, and I could go on. And the driver.

And that's Man Group. It's enabled and it's propelled to the finish line with excellence by the entire team that sits underneath it. And that's cultural, that's collaboration, that's collegiality, and that's why it's so important that when we come to work every day, we have one single goal, and that pulls us together.