Artificial Intelligence Industry Insights
Microsoft Research Finds Organizations Across Industries are “Embracing Tech Intensity As a Key Driver of Competitive Advantage”
McKinsey on Asian Asset Management – Five Disruptions Impacting Future Growth
Asset Management M&A Perspectives from Casey Quirk/Deloitte
Asset & Wealth Management Revolution: pwc identifies six game changers & four key trends for the decade ahead
AI Asset Management Studies – An Overview of Recent Research and Surveys from McKinsey, Accenture, Brookings, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, Oliver Wyman, Casey Quirk, Roubini, and others
Most of the bigger accounting, consulting, advisory and research houses…
Credit Suisse Data Science Team Leaves to Set up AI Shop, sees Google and Alibaba as the New Competition
About a year and a half ago, Jonathan Wilmot, Credit…
JP Morgan and AI: „This is not Pie-in-the-Sky Stuff“
JP Morgan has been extremely busy in the last few…
From $2.5B to $58B… Two Sigma’s AI Investment Strategy: Humans and Big Data Crowdsourcing
Two Sigma describes itself as “a systematic investment manager, founded…
Baillie Gifford Chair into Data and AI Ethics and AI for long-term stock picking
The media-shy low/high-profile 110-year old investment manager Baillie Gifford last month…
SEB Head of Emerging Tech becomes Group CIO after receiving Supernova award for Aida AI
Nicholas Moch joined SEB in 2008 as Head of IT…
AQR Turning 20 and Showing an Open-Source Team Approach to Use Data Science and AI in Asset Management
About ten years ago I interviewed Cliff Asness at an…
Brevan Howard Appoints Head of AI Driven Systematic Investments
Brevan Howard, after hiring Karim-Patrick Khiar in the spring of…
Manulife/John Hancock and their “LOFTy” AI Ambitions – now in Silicon Valley
Canada has always been a (quiet) leader of AI in…
Foot Locker’s Pivot to Data Science and AI
When a traditional shoe-retailer like Foot Locker creates data-science teams…
About Us
We pioneered executive search 49 years ago and in 1993 the firm morphed into a liftout specialist, for investment and distribution/HNW teams. As such, our sole focus for the last two and a half decades has been on team liftouts and small acquisitions in the investment management industry.
Robert Warren pioneered the liftout business in the early nineties and Institutional Investor Magazine ten years later labeled him the “liftout king”. Daniel Enskat has written a dozen books on the asset management industry and leads our proprietary quantitative and qualitative research efforts. The combination of data and research along with our network is key to each assignment.
Moving a group of people to a new firm is NOT a liftout, a concept often misunderstood in the industry. We define a liftout as bringing you a top decile team along with an immediately marketable track record and portable institutional assets. A liftout is profitable immediately and acts a pied piper for other asset classes and products, hiring multiple individuals is not. The teams we bring are never looking in the marketplace, as they are top performers and in most cases have worked together for over a decade.
In recent years our focus has been on artificial intelligence and how it is impacting asset management distribution, operations and investments. Our team spent time all over the world to personally meet with the top AI pioneers and leaders tho see how they would tackle AI, for automation as well as investments and to get involved with asset managers, be that as a team liftout, acquisition, JV or as R&D. “AI is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it. Nobody knows how to do it. But everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so they claim they do it too.” This is especially true in investment management, where firms overpay for the wrong talent and address the wrong issues. We can connect you to the leaders in AI, spend less, and grow more.
"A liftout is a complex process which requires us to work with, consult and at times guide your legal, operational, compliance and HR staff to ensure a smooth process and successful business from day one."
Robert Warren
What We Do
We have facilitated over 70 team liftouts and investment boutique acquisitions in the last two decades, with each team still with the firms we placed them with. We have clients in all continents and across all business models, including long only and alternatives.
Business continuity and cultural fit are the most important factors for our work. Warren Enskat will work with you to create a systematic process and structure to find those top decile performing investment teams. We have the ability to look for multiple teams at the same time and integrate them seamlessly into the cultural fabric of the organization, along with key distribution talent, portable track records and asset trails to ensure profitability from day one along with AUM growth.