Tim Warrington has been elected the new chairman of the Group of Boutique Asset Managers (GBAM) at the organisation’s AGM in London on Friday.
Stavanger based Warrington, the deputy Managing Director of Norwegian asset manager SKAGEN, joins Past Chairman, Jose Luis Jimenez, Chief Investment Officer at Mapfre and South African Hlelo Giyose, CEO of Johannesburg based First Avenue Asset Management, on the GBAM Board. Also, elected was Ladislao Larrain, the CEO of Chilean asset manager Larrain Vial Asset Management.
Beltran Parages of Madrid based value manager, azValor, retires from the Board by rotation having served three years. John Morgan, MD of Fortuna Asset Management Communications remains the Board’s Secretary.
Tim Warrington said, “The Asset Management Boutique is an essential competitive element in the asset management landscape. The outperformance demonstrated by boutique asset managers over the long term needs to be more widely recognised as a force for good as society grapples with historically lower returns from pension schemes and other forms of savings. I look forward to leading GBAM to further its objectives of promoting the added value of boutique asset managers.”
The GBAM AGM agreed to hold the next annual meeting in Santiago, Chile, and to repeat its 2015 Value Conference in Siena, Italy, in the autumn.
The 2017 meeting focused on defining the culture of boutiques on issues such as ownership, remuneration, and structures. The meeting heard from both Tim Warrington of SKAGEN and Dr. Pius Fisch of Zurich based convertibles specialist, Fisch Asset Management, on approaches to employing new staff as well as remuneration structures.
The Group also discussed the definition of a boutique asset manager which it narrowed down to:
“A boutique asset manager is a smaller, highly motivated, specialist firm which aligns the interests of its owners, staff and clients while seeking consistent outperformance.”