When Euan Munro took up the CEO role at Newton Investment Management, he was taking the helm of a business that was about to change dramatically.
He joined the firm in June 2021 amid a process to transform the then-$62.8 billion firm. In February 2021, Hanneke Smits — CEO of parent firm BNY Mellon Investment Management and former CEO of Newton — began reorganizing some of the money managers within the BNY Mellon stable. One of the changes was to move Mellon Investments Corp.'s equities and multiasset strategies and teams, as well as BNY Mellon Investment Management's Japanese equities team, to Newton.
The integrations enlarged Newton's global footprint. As well as almost doubling the firm's assets under management at the time — Newton now runs $103 billion in assets — the change also moved the dial on its client base, with the firm now 50% U.S. and 50% rest of the world, and he now also has portfolio managers based outside of London.
"Newton was going from a single-site fund management business … to a genuinely global business, but (it was) more than just a geographical spread," Mr. Munro said in an interview at Newton's headquarters in London. "We were bringing in some heavy-duty quantitative capabilities from San Francisco. We (brought) in real depth in small- and midcap U.S. equities with the team in Boston — whereas previously, Newton really just had the resources to look at large-cap U.S. And then we were … bringing to the (new) American colleagues … sustainability research that we had here in London," he said.
That new quantitative capability is something Mr. Munro highlighted as an exciting area of growth for Newton, as well as income strategies and the firm's multiasset offering for the U.K. adviser market.
Adding that breadth of expertise through the combination of the teams and capabilities also helped to build the firm's active multidimensional research platform — something Mr. Munro has been keen to communicate to clients. The aim of the platform is to equip Newton executives with the strategies, information and research they need to navigate a changing market environment.