Richard Philbin

22 October 2009 8:00 am | By Hannah Smith

Richard Philbin says he always had his sights set on a career in fund management but little did he know that he would become the chief investment officer of a multi-manager business with more than £10bn of assets under management.

As part of Axa-backed Architas, Philbin has one of the biggest multi-manager roles in the UK. His spark for financial services was ignited when he met his father’s uncle, who was a fund manager in the US.

“Being young and impressionable, every time I saw him, he seemed to have lots of money and he said he was a fund manager on Wall Street.

When we went to see him I saw the house, the Porsche and more houses in the country and I decided I wanted some of that.”

Philbin kicked off his investment career by saving £150 to invest in the Brit Oil IPO. “I turned that £150 into £250 and it seemed like money for nothing and if there were any doubts they went away instantly.”

Lots of reading and more investments were played in the late 1980s as he worked at his father’s import/export business before getting into the investment game.

He took a financial services degree at Bristol, which is where he first bumped into Hargreaves Lansdown founder Peter Hargreaves, who came to make a speech in his final year. “He spoke for 45 minutes on how financial services worked and then he did a 15-minute Q&A session, at which point I asked why he is involved in financial services when he has written all those Mr Men books? I was politely reminded by Peter that the author was Roger Hargreaves and not Peter Hargreaves.”

Philbin completed his degree and started work at the Berkeley Group in Coventry where he says he built up most of his knowledge of model and risk- adjusted portfolios. “It was there that I recognised filtering tools were needed for funds quite simply because there were too many and not enough time to concentrate on all of them.”

He left as investment director to join Towry Law to set up its investment management team in 1999.

“I realised somebody hated me as I spent five years in Coventry and I learnt that the one nice road in Coventry is the road out, only to find that Bracknell is the Coventry of the South, although I did meet my wife in Coventry.”

Philbin joined Friends Ivory & Sime to head the fund of funds’ portfolios - a period which he says is best remembered for a number of transitions. “In the seven years I was there, I had 18 different business cards, worked for four different businesses and my phone number never changed once.”
After working under the Friends Provident, Isis and F&C business guises, Philbin left F&C in April 2008 before starting his new role at Architas in September that year.

Philbin says Architas is much more than a multi-manager and acts as a third-party gatekeeper for Axa’s pan-European business. “Should any of the businesses in Axa want to launch a guided-architecture offering or launch their own range of funds but decide they do not want to go to an in-house Axa business to run them and instead choose a third party, then we have to do that for them. So we also run funds branded Architas and a service to the wider group, such as Winterthur Life, which has guided architecture and elite ranges.”

He says the business wanted to build up its investment focus as well as the single-strategy, single-company insurance mandates, which need to be widened out as it cannot be a panacea to all investors.

Architas also has six multi-manager funds run by Casper Rock and recently acquired the assets of nine manager of manager mandates from MLC.

Philbin says his role is to shape the way the front office works in dealing with a number of global businesses. He says he needs to make his team of 11 work in co-ordination with each other in dealing with these firms’.

“The balance I wanted is to not have yes men around me - and I don’t - and ensure they all work to a framework. Some of that framework is the regulatory framework, so, for example, some of the people I have that have joined from Winterthur are familiar with the investment world and not the regulatory world.”

Philbin says the team work with around 30,000 collectives globally and his team has created a new screening tool, based on his traffic-light analysis process he designed at F&C.

“That was designed by myself but this time I have a programmer who joined on the same day who works purely for me. I spent a long time talking about how I wanted it to work and consequently it is a fully functional system written in proper programming code and it is the first part of the framework I want everyone to follow.

The system, which has the working title of Mosaique, looks across performance, loss and volatility, among other criteria. Despite this process the team has still had 800 fund manager meetings so far this year.

Philbin says there are a number of products and initiatives the group intends to bring to market in the next few years.

“We have intentions of launching our own range of products on top of the six retail funds but nothing that is concrete at this stage. We are launching a protected range later this year with underlying products beneath them rather than most protected funds, which are passive and follow an index.”

He says Axa has the distribution and critical mass that multi-manager needs. “It was important to have the commitment. The Architas business is one of Axa’s top five priorities and for 32-odd people out of thousands that work for the group worldwide, that is both impressive and an added pressure.

“We have not even scratched the surface. We are building from a blank sheet of paper. In five years, I would imagine we will be an much bigger in terms of assets under management and front-office systems. I would not be surprised if we took £500m of assets in the next 12 months alone. I think that the upside for the business is limitless.”

Born: Leicestershire
Lives: Boxmoor, Hertfordshire
Education: degree - financial services, started as Bristol Polytechnic, graduated from University of West England
Career: 1994-99: Berkeley Fund Managers (Coventry) 1999-2001: Towry Law Investment Managers (Windsor/Bracknell) 2001-08 - Friends Ivory & Sime/Isis/ F&C (London) 2008-present: Architas Multi Manager (London)
Likes: Football - Manchester City, motorsport (F1, touring cars, lawnmower racing…) Basically, if it has an engine, I’m interested. Snowboarding
Dislikes: Cheese sauce
Drives: Range Rover
Book: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or The World According to Garp by John Irving
Film: LA Story/Shawshank Redemption/The Player/ Enemy of the State/Ronin - too many to mention
Album: Tracey Chapman by Tracey Chapman
Career ambition: Deliver what is expected - from both clients and the boss
Life ambition: To be there for my family when they need me and to protect and provide.
If I wasn’t doing this I would be…..No idea - wanted to do this since a small boy. Possibly Jeremy Clarkson - am almost as tall, have just as bad dress sense, love cars, and talk far too much. You get to drive cars fast and not care about the condition you hand them back in

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