Mercury Asset Management

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]

• Peter Stormonth Darling, The Life & Times of Mercury Asset Management, Texere, 2000 ISBN 978-1-58799-035-9