 | |
| 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, formerly known as Fidelity Management & Research (FMR), is an American multinational financial services corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts. Established in 1946, the company is one of the largest asset managers in the world, with $5.4 trillion in assets under management, and $14.1 trillion in assets under administration, as of June 2024, 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, securities execution and clearance, asset custody, and life insurance.
A. G. Becker & Co. was an investment bank based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC 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 and other financial assets across public and private markets. PIMCO is one of the largest investment managers, actively managing more than $2 trillion in assets for central banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, corporations, foundations and endowments, and individual investors around the world. According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, PIMCO is the 6th-largest asset manager in the world by managed AUM.
BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment company. Founded in 1988, initially as an enterprise 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 December 31, 2023. Headquartered at 50 Hudson Yards in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, BlackRock has 78 offices in 38 countries, and clients in 100 countries. BlackRock is the manager of the iShares group of exchange-traded funds, and along with The Vanguard Group and State Street, it is considered to be one of the Big Three index fund managers. Its Aladdin software keeps track of investment portfolios for many major financial institutions and its BlackRock Solutions division provides financial risk management services. As of 2023, BlackRock was ranked 229th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue.
Merrill Lynch & Co., formally Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, was a publicly-traded American investment bank that existed independently from 1914 until January 2009 before being acquired by Bank of America and rolled into BofA Securities.
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, retail clients and also of Allianz itself. AGI became known for one of the biggest fraud cases in which its Structured Alpha fund lost over 6 billion dollars in the 2020 market sell-off. As the risk profile of the fund was missold to the investors it led to charges against the company and its managers.
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.
GAM Investments is an independent, pure play asset management group headquartered in Zurich. The Group sells to a wide range of client segments such as institutions, wholesale intermediaries, financial advisers, and private investors. The Group’s investment management business is complemented by a private labelling unit which provides outsourcing for third-party asset managers.
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 a British businesswoman and writer. She 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.
Dame Anne Helen Richards is the chief executive officer of the investment management company 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).
Dawn Fitzpatrick is an American investment banker and financial officer based in New York City. She is known for her work as a hedge fund manager and as the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief investment officer (CIO) at Soros Fund Management.
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 commonly referred to as Andreas E.F. Utermann(born January 1966) is an Anglo-German businessman and banking executive. Utermann was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of Vontobel Holding AG at the company’s AGM on April 6, 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.
Patrick Degorce is a French hedge fund manager, and the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Theleme Partners LLP.
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