 | |
| Industry | Investment management |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1969 |
| Defunct | 1997 |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Successor | Merrill Lynch |
| Headquarters | London, UK |
Key people | Peter Stormonth Darling (Chairman), Hugh Stevenson (Chairman), Carol Galley (Vice-Chairman), Stephen Zimmerman (Deputy Chairman) |
Number of employees | 1,300 |
Mercury Asset Management plc was a leading British investment management business. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The Company was established in 1969 when S. G. Warburg & Co., the investment bank, won an investment management contract and set up Warburg Investment Management to execute it. In 1987 25% of the business was floated on the London Stock Exchange as Mercury Asset Management. Carol Galley, one of its leading managers, was credited with facilitating the takeovers by Granada of both London Weekend Television in 1994 and Forte Group in 1996. [1] At its peak more than half the companies on the FTSE 100 used Mercury Asset Management for investment management purposes. [2]
In 1995 the Company achieved full independence when S. G. Warburg & Co. sold its investment banking business to Swiss Bank Corporation; through a scheme of arrangement the residue of S. G. Warburg & Co. became a subsidiary of Mercury Asset Management and S. G. Warburg & Co. shareholders become shareholders in Mercury Asset Management. [3]
The Company was acquired by Merrill Lynch for £3.1bn in 1997. [4] [5] Mercury was rebranded Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (MLIM), which in turn was acquired by Blackrock in 2006. [6]
Five years after Blackrock’s 2006 acquisition of MLIM, one UK media report quoted a consultant as saying: "BlackRock is a big firm. But there is more than a trace of Mercury DNA running through it." [7] This was particularly true in Europe where Blackrock’s business was headed until 2015 by James Charrington, who had joined Mercury in 1993. [8]
A number of investors who worked at Mercury Asset Management during the late 1980s and 1990s went on to occupy senior positions within the industry in the generation that followed. Nicola Horlick’s career in investment banking began at Mercury, when it was called Warburg. [9] Before Paul Marshall established Marshall Wace he had worked for Mercury. In 2001, Peter Davies and Stuart Roden went on to establish a successful UK equity fund for Lansdowne Partners. [10] The following year, Anne Richards left to join Edinburgh Fund Managers and onwards to Aberdeen Asset Management where she was CIO before becoming CEO at M&G Investments in 2014 and at CEO at Fidelity International in 2018. [11] Andreas Utermann left Mercury/MLIM for Allianz, followed two years later by Elizabeth Corley; they co-headed Allianz Global Investors as Global CIO and CEO respectively, from 2012 until 2016; [12] Utermann continued as CEO until 2019. [13] while Corley has joined a number of boards and led a government review on social impact investing. [14] Saker Nusseibeh, the CEO of Hermes Investment Management, began his career at Mercury in 1987. [15]
While Carol Galley did not return to fund management following her departure from Mercury in 2001, [16] Stephen Zimmerman her co-head did set up a boutique investment firm, NewSmith Capital Partners, in 2004 along with other former senior managers from Merrill Lynch (Michael Marks, Paul Roy and Check Low, who had joined Merrill via the acquisition of Smith New Court). [17]
Fidelity Investments Inc., commonly referred to as Fidelity, earlier as Fidelity Management & Research or FMR, is an American multinational financial services corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was established in 1946 and is one of the largest asset managers in the world with $4.5 trillion in assets under management, now as of December 2021 their assets under administration amounts to $11.8 trillion. Fidelity Investments operates a brokerage firm, manages a large family of mutual funds, provides fund distribution and investment advice, retirement services, index funds, wealth management, cryptocurrency, securities execution and clearance, asset custody, and life insurance.
A. G. Becker & Co. was an investment bank based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
PIMCO is an American investment management firm focusing on active fixed income management worldwide. PIMCO manages investments in many asset classes such as fixed income, equities, commodities, asset allocation, ETFs, hedge funds, and private equity. PIMCO is one of the largest investment managers, actively managing more than $2.21 trillion in assets for central banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, corporations, foundations and endowments, and individual investors around the world. PIMCO is headquartered in Newport Beach, California, and has over 2,900 employees working in 17 offices throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with US$10 trillion in assets under management as of January 2022. BlackRock operates globally with 70 offices in 30 countries and clients in 100 countries.
S. G. Warburg & Co. was a London-based investment bank. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. The firm was acquired by the Swiss Bank Corporation in 1995 and ultimately became a part of UBS.
Allianz Global Investors, is a global investment management firm with offices in over 20 locations worldwide. It is owned by the global financial services group Allianz. Employing nearly 3,000, it manages over EUR 500 billion in assets on behalf of institutional and retail clients and also of Allianz itself.
An alternative investment is an investment in any asset class excluding stocks, bonds, and cash. The term is a relatively loose one and includes tangible assets such as precious metals, collectibles and some financial assets such as real estate, commodities, private equity, distressed securities, hedge funds, exchange funds, carbon credits, venture capital, film production, financial derivatives, cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens. Investments in real estate, forestry and shipping are also often termed "alternative" despite the ancient use of such real assets to enhance and preserve wealth. Alternative investments are to be contrasted with traditional investments.
Nicola Karina Christina Horlick is a British investment fund manager, dubbed City 'superwoman' in the British media. She has publicly supported the Labour Party and latterly, the Liberal Democrats.
Risk parity is an approach to investment management which focuses on allocation of risk, usually defined as volatility, rather than allocation of capital. The risk parity approach asserts that when asset allocations are adjusted to the same risk level, the risk parity portfolio can achieve a higher Sharpe ratio and can be more resistant to market downturns than the traditional portfolio. Risk parity is vulnerable to significant shifts in correlation regimes, such as observed in Q1 2020, which led to the significant underperformance of risk-parity funds in the Covid-19 sell-off.
UBS Group AG is a multinational investment bank and financial services company founded and based in Switzerland. Co-headquartered in the cities of Zürich and Basel, it maintains a presence in all major financial centres as the largest Swiss banking institution and the largest private bank in the world. UBS client services are known for their strict bank–client confidentiality and culture of banking secrecy. Because of the bank's large positions in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific markets, the Financial Stability Board considers it a global systemically important bank.
Hg is a private equity firm targeting technology buyouts primarily in Europe and the US. Hg focuses on investments in technology and services sectors. It invests out of its 8th £2.5 billion core fund and its 2nd £575 million Mercury fund, targeting smaller technology buyouts, both raised in February 2017. Both funds were closed on their hard-caps and were more than 3x oversubscribed versus their targets, receiving strong re-ups from existing investors. The company raised its 1st time £1.5B Saturn large-cap fund in March 2018 and in 2020 raised $11B across three funds, Mercury 3, Genesis 9 and Saturn 2.
Dame Elizabeth Pauline Lucy Corley is Chair of the Impact Investing Institute. She was CEO of Allianz Global Investors, initially for Europe and then globally, from 2005 to 2016. She continued to act as an advisor to the company in various capacities until the end of 2019. She is also a Non-Executive Director at BAE Systems plc, Morgan Stanley Inc. and Schroders plc.
Arabesque Partners is an Anglo-German investment management firm founded in 2013, with headquarters in London and a research hub in Frankfurt. The company offers a quantitative approach to sustainable investing.
Dame Anne Helen Richards is the chief executive officer of Fidelity International.
Moneyfarm is an online investment advisor and one of the largest digital wealth management companies in Europe, regulated by the FCA (UK) and CONSOB (ITA).
Aberdeen Private Equity is a Private Equity business which is part of Aberdeen Asset Management. It was originally known as Bramdean Alternatives.
Sir Hugh Alexander Stevenson is a businessman known for being a former chairman of Mercury Asset Management and Equitas.
Andreas Ernst Ferdinand Utermann is an Anglo-German businessman. Utermann was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of Vontobel Holding AG at the company’s AGM on April 6th, 2022. Utermann led Allianz Global Investors, a global investment company owned by Allianz, for eight years from 2012, initially as a co-head and Global Chief Investment Officer and then as CEO from 2016.
Stephen Anthony Zimmerman was deputy chairman and co-head of Mercury Asset Management throughout the 1990s alongside Carol Galley.
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