BM: Any concern that those other people from those other industries, like the Amazons, Googles, and whatever, will get into your industry à la Ant Financial, say, in China?
AJ: Ant operates in a very different regulatory environment than we do. Ant couldn’t exist in the U.S., because you can’t mix the businesses the way they do. In terms of those other companies, they’ve certainly been investigating. We know that.
BM: We’ve seen BlackRock and Vanguard start to make a big push in Europe with ETFs. Where do you see the global opportunities?
AJ: The U.K.—if you look at the dynamics of the market and the regulatory environment—is actually starting to look and feel more like the U.S. Many corporates there are going down the path of prioritizing defined-contribution plans. In fact, the way the rules are structured there, companies are heavily incented to have defined-contribution plans. The members of those plans are encouraged more strongly into the plans even than they are here in the U.S.
You’re seeing robo-advisors in that marketplace. The banks are not as prominent. The regulators have been encouraging more competition and new players to come into the marketplace. It’s an interesting place right now. We’ve got a very strong presence in the U.K. We have a long history [through Fidelity International]. Anthony Bolton, who is as famous in the U.K. as Peter Lynch was here in the U.S., was a fund manager there for many years. He’s still a director of the company and maintains a presence around the organization.
There’s not really a direct business on the Continent, but we have good relationships with many wholesalers. And ditto in Japan. We’ve got a strong investment team due to our start in 1969 in Tokyo, and Hong Kong is another place we’ve been for a long time. It’s not a huge market, but, again, we’ve done reasonably well through wholesalers. It turned out to be valuable, because now we’ve had an effort to build a presence in China.
We started putting people there, and there are all these little steps you have to go through. We’ve got a license for our own wholly owned financial services company there.
“We’re in the midst of a $22 trillion shift in assets to women, because of longevity, because they’ll outlive their spouse, because of divorce.”
BM: Your father ran the company for decades. What was he like to work for?
AJ: Well, he was famous for being a contrarian, and I think that probably rubbed off on me. I’m not afraid to have a different point of view. He was incredibly inquisitive of everybody all the time. From what people tell me, I have a tendency to do the same thing. Whether that’s genetic or it comes out of the fact that we were both analysts and fund managers before we became managers, I don’t know. I think, for me, having an investment background as he did was really helpful, because your basic mode of operation is to be asking questions and expecting people to help you figure stuff out.