Chief Executive of a £40bn Asset Manager
A CEO succession at a long-established asset manager, completed after eighteen months of leadership advisory work that materially reframed what the appointment was for.
- Duration
- 14 weeks (search) + 18 months advisory
- Completed
- June 2025
- Lead Partner
- Katherine Wren
The context
The firm — a £40bn asset manager with a fifty-year history and an enviable client list — had been led by the same Chief Executive for eleven years. The succession question had been live for at least three of those years, but had not been worked on with any structure.
We were engaged eighteen months before the eventual appointment to do work that the firm did not, at first, describe as search work. The early conversations were about the firm itself — what it had become, what it would need to be, and which of the obvious internal successors might genuinely lead that transition.
The work that came first
The first six months were leadership advisory, not search. We assessed three internal candidates, in close partnership with the firm’s Chair and the outgoing CEO. We engaged with the institutional investor base — quietly, on the firm’s behalf — to understand expectations and concerns. We mapped the external market, with no intention of running an external search, in order to give the board a properly informed view of what the alternative looked like.
The conclusion that emerged was uncomfortable but clear. The strongest internal candidate was a year, perhaps eighteen months, short of the role. An external appointment, made well, would be a stronger answer for the firm’s next decade.
The search
The search itself, when we finally ran it, was fourteen weeks — comparatively quick, because the long preparation meant the brief was uncommonly clear. The eventual appointee was a Managing Director from a peer firm. He had not been on our initial map; he came to us through a chain of conversations that only the long preparatory work made possible.
The internal candidate has, in the year since, taken on an expanded role and is widely understood to be the next-but-one successor.
Why it matters
The most senior search engagements are usually best done in two phases — a long, considered, advisory phase that ends with the brief, and a comparatively short search phase that ends with the appointment. The discipline is to invest properly in the first phase. Most firms do not. We do.