eFinancialCareers

The gloves are off in the Scottish fund management industry, as newcomers to Edinburgh have sparked a war for talent.

“There’s a lot of poaching going on – it’s a dog-eat-dog world. The cosy deal that once existed in Scotland where they wouldn’t touch each other’s people has long since been ripped up,” says one headhunter in the region.

The traditional culture of loyalty in the fund management industry harks back to the days when it was dependent on the asset management arms of insurers like Standard Life, and smaller independent partnerships such as Marin Currie and Baillie Gifford.

Now Scotland has attracted bigger players to town, with BlackRock, Schroders and Fidelity all having a presence in the country, and some of this loyalty has gone out of the window.

Fidelity opened its long-awaited Edinburgh office a couple of weeks ago, after announcing in April that ‘talent’ was one of the draws of the Scottish capital.

Since then it’s been linked to every high-profile departure we can think of, though in reality it has only bagged two big players – David Urch from Scottish Widows investment Partnership (SWIP) and Jonathan Cobb from Standard Life Investments.

“Fidelity talked to every UK manager in Edinburgh and all they succeeded in doing was putting £50k on everyone’s bonus cheque by announcing what they were doing before they did it,” says the headhunter.

SWIP, which has been without a chief executive since Chris Phillips’ departure in January, seems to have been the biggest victim of the fund manager merry-go-round. As well as Urch, newcomer BlackRock swiped Nigel Bolton, its head of European equities, who then took a team of seven with him.

But in among the high-profile departures, SWIP has also been doing its own fair share of recruitment. It quickly replaced the lost fund managers and has lured 12 new managers this year.