Back on your original question: We had some outside help come in to help us facilitate some conversations. Men and women see the facts the same way. But how they feel about the facts is often very different.
BM: On the executive side you have quite a few women in prominent positions. There are clearly a lot of female money managers. When I look at Fidelity, Capital Group, T. Rowe Price, whatever, it’s pretty unusual still to see women running significant funds, especially on the equity side. It’s a little less true, I think, in fixed income. Is that just history, or is there something more to it?
AJ: For us, it’s gone in waves. You would remember the likes of Beth Terrana and Bettina Doulton, who were some of our most successful fund managers. Right now there isn’t a woman who’s in that top group of people with tremendous assets and performance, but there’s pretty good representation in the investment organization.
BM: You have spoken a little bit about blockchain and crypto. What excites you in that area?
AJ: One of the things we do to try to get people in the organization thinking about the future and get past just thinking about the next incremental thing is scenario-planning exercises. We get different people from different parts of the organization together in a team to tackle some crazy scenario.
We did a series of these a while ago, and one of them was what would happen to our business if capital markets became completely frictionless. Right after that, about 2010 I think, Bitcoin started getting a little bit of visibility. A few of us were like, “Oh, this is kind of actually what we were just talking about in our crazy scenario plan. Maybe we were onto something.”
So a few of us were reading about it and started meeting to get the benefit of our collective thinking. Then that morphed into: How could we apply this in our business? Then we rallied some people around the organization to work on those use cases, and the response rate was actually surprisingly positive.
The one thing fairly early that I think gave us some visibility in that realm was being able to contribute Bitcoin to your charitable gift fund.
That got us connected with a bunch of very successful Bitcoin entrepreneurs who loved the fact that we were a legacy financial services company but still open to doing this and trying to help them the way we would help any investor. A lot of these people were geeky tech entrepreneurs who had come upon all this money, and they wanted to be philanthropic but it actually wasn’t very easy to do, and we made it easy for them.
Then a bunch of our adviser clients started calling and asking us if we could help them with their clients who were Bitcoin holders. A lot of that was stimulated by having become part of the ecosystem.