ALLIANCE TRUST: APPOINTMENT
Katherine Garrett-Cox insists she is not going to rest on her laurels
SHE is the “Superwoman” who held down a £1 million a year investment job in the City at the same time as raising a family – all four of her children are aged under seven. So why has Katherine Garrett-Cox accepted an offer to work for a comparative investment minnow in Dundee?
It was a question which was doing the rounds in London’s investment management community last week, following the news that the 39-year-old chief investment officer of Morley Fund Management is “downshifting” to fulfil a similar role at the Dundee-based Alliance Trust.
Whereas Alliance Trust has about £2.8 billion under management, Morley, owned by the Aviva nsurance conglomerate, has £166bn.
Much was made of Garrett-Cox’s young family and the fact she has a holiday home near Brechin, about 30 minutes drive from the City of Discovery.
Yet Garrett-Cox, who earned herself the nickname “Katherine the Great” through the performance of the North American funds she managed when she was at Hill Samuel Asset Management (HSAM) in the 1990s, is not going to be resting on her laurels.
She is joining Alliance at an interesting time. The investment company — which remains self-managed, conservatively accounted and reluctant to pay commission to independent financial advisers — has been going through two years of fast-paced but evolutionary change under the leadership of Alan Harden, born to an US father and an English mother on a US Air Force base at Burtonwood in Cheshire, who took over as Alliance Trust chief executive in January 2004.
And even though the total assets that Garrett-Cox will oversee appear smaller, they are different from the billions of insurance money managed by Morley.
At Alliance, Harden is giving her the task of reinventing the investment side of the business, with the scope to launch new investment trusts, new unit trusts or OEICs, discretionary portfolio management — essentially giving her a clean slate to lead the debate at board level.
Harden has been trying to persuade her to join Alliance Trust for about 12 months. He said: “We wanted someone world class to look after our investment activity at plc level and build up the whole asset management business. Katherine’s strong, far-sighted strategic approach and evident investment skills set her apart from other candidates.”
Harden, who previously held senior roles with Citigroup Asset Management and Standard Chartered in Asia, has transformed Alliance Trust in two years at the helm. The biggest change came when the two Alliance Trusts were merged last June. Overnight, the unified trust became the UK’s largest generalist investment trust, with assets under management of around £2.6bn.
Other changes have included a broadening out of the sectors in which the trust invests — which was key to making the CIO role more attractive to Garrett-Cox. Under former investment director Alan Young, who retired last autumn, Alliance Trust invested almost exclusively in UK and global equities. The trust has been diversifying into private equity, fixed interest and property — partly because an over-reliance on equities can create volatile performance. As part of this process it recently acquired private equity business Albany Ventures.
On 8 January, Alliance Trust also reaffirmed its commitment to Dundee, saying it had secured a £1.95m Regional Selective Assistance grant to create 160 jobs in the city. It also said it is building a 50,000 sq ft head office building capable of housing 400 staff.
Garrett-Cox will continue to work for Morley until March and will then have about four weeks off before starting at Alliance Trust in late April or early May.
She originally aspired to be a musician but after graduating in history at Durham University, she ended up working for fund management group Fidelity Investments. At HSAM she built her reputation as a stock picker, once famously saying she never bought into companies run by men with beards or too much jewellery.
She left HSAM ahead of its merger with Scottish Widows in 2000, defecting along with four colleagues to Aberdeen Asset Management where she remained largely untainted by the split capital investment trust scandal.
Garrett-Cox has been chief investment officer at Morley for the past three years — but spent some of that time on maternity leave and never fully turned around the group’s performance, according to investment consultants.
She was recently among seven Britons named as “young global leaders” by the World Economic Forum, along with yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur.
This article was published in the Sunday Herald on 4 February 2007