Back from Oz on a management mission

Rory MacIntyre, managing director of PI Investment Management, could be forgiven for feeling a bit of pressure in his job. He has, after all, got quite a number of people to please.

On one side, he has Perpetual Trustees, the grand old Australian finance house that sent him off to make its fortune in Dublin. On the other, he has the team of four top-ranking fund managers that Perpetual poached from Bank of Ireland Asset Management (BIAM) to help it meet its ambitions for the Dublin operation.

This group (along with 12 or so colleagues) is hungry for mandates to manage and it is MacIntyre's job to find them.

There is more riding on this than fear of boredom. The former BIAM managers - Des Sullivan, John Nolan, John Forde and Richard Kelly - hit the headlines in September when it emerged that they had been lured to Perpetual's new operation with the promise of a share plan worth €16 million that depended on performance.

So far, progress on bringing in the business that will allow them to shine has been slow, although the nature of the fund management business makes this understandable. Mandates tend to be awarded on the basis of proven returns and, given that PI is essentially a new company, it has none.

There is thus an element of chicken and egg about this but MacIntyre and his merry band reckon they are up to the task. Perpetual has underlined this belief by transferring €1.3 billion in funds to the Dublin operation.

Some evidence of home-grown success has meanwhile come with the award of an external manager mandate by Irish Life in May. This was an early coup for the firm, making it just the third external player on Irish Life's funds platform. The company also said at that stage that it had a €35 million mandate in Australia, but no news has emerged since then.

MacIntyre professes himself content with the pace of progress: "I'm very confident it will happen," he says firmly.

"It's a slow-burn business," he adds, acknowledging that a faster inflow of business would be nice.

"The Australians are very comfortable with the shape of the business."

Dublin is the first operation Perpetual has set up outside its native Australia and, as such, the move has not gone without comment in the group's domestic arena. In reality, the Dublin operation could have been in any of a number of places, with the decision to locate in the Republic driven almost entirely by the ability to recruit the BIAM team.

MacIntyre explains that Perpetual was looking for a "new growth engine" that would involve expanding its footprint in asset management. A firm of New York consultants was dispatched in the spring of 2004 to find asset managers who fitted the Perpetual brief: they needed to be experienced and well-regarded in global equities, to speak English and to have the same "bottom-up" investment philosophy as Perpetual. By the early autumn, the BIAM fund managers were on board and PI Investment Management was formed.

MacIntyre, who was not personally involved in selecting Dublin, admits that he couldn't believe his luck when the news emerged. He had been asked by his employers in April whether or not he would be interested in a move away from Australia, where he had been living for the previous decade. The actual location was not disclosed but his hunch was that it would be somewhere in the US.

When it turned out to be his native city, the opportunity suddenly became much more than a professional opening - it was a gift-wrapped opportunity to come home. Luckily for domestic harmony, MacIntyre's Australian wife had already had some exposure to Irish life. She had lived in Dublin in the early 1990s, when MacIntyre was working in an archiving business he had founded. The business was later sold to UK plc, Allied Pickfords, and MacIntyre subsequently moved back to Australia.

He had worked there in foreign exchange for a few years at the end of the 1980s so found it fairly easy to get a job with Perpetual's fund management division after he moved back. He says the business was at the time "relatively insignificant" within the larger Perpetual Group. Today, the division accounts for 80 per cent of group revenues and has about €16 billion under management.

MacIntyre says Perpetual has designated no specific time window during which the Dublin operation must prove itself but the parent has signalled that it expects it to break even after its first year. This means lots of work for MacIntyre, who currently finds himself doing lots of "talking to the marketplace" about what PI can offer.

The world of managing global equities - which is PI's only area of expertise - is worth about $2.5 trillion across the industry.

It thus makes sense, given that the Republic is nothing more than a pinprick in this giant tapestry, that PI's attentions are much more focused on the huge UK market. This focus sees the company competing directly for mandates with operations such as Capital, Wellington and, you've guessed it, BIAM.

The Bank of Ireland-owned operation has gone through a rough period of losing mandates since Perpetual poached those key staff, but there is no triumphalism from McIntyre.

In fact, he thinks there is room for more new entrants into the Dublin fund management scene, such is the "talent" available on the ground.

Just don't try poaching any of his managers unless you are prepared to pay very big bucks.