Sky's the limit to ambition of Mellon chief McGuinn

History teaches that if a family-run company is to survive successfully after the founding members have slipped out of the picture, it will need much skill and a little bit of luck.

The trick of course is to migrate operations into non-family hands without losing whatever it was that made the company a winner in the first place.

Take Pennsylvania-based Mellon Bank as an example. Founded in 1867 by Judge Thomas Mellon, a Co Tyrone Presbyterian, the bank remained in the Mellon family for the next 100 years. Business boomed, even throughout the American depression, as operations were carefully passed from father to son, to brother, to nephew.

Soon after the judge's descendants departed the managerial picture in the late 1960s, however, things went downhill and financial problems emerged. It took two chief executives to get things back on track, with the most recent of these, Mr Marty McGuinn, still in the chair.

Mr McGuinn, in Dublin this week to survey Mellon's IFSC operation, acknowledges now that someone of his Irish-Catholic background may have had difficulty gaining a foothold in Mellon a generation previously.

He even jokes that the judge, whose roots were in Protestant Ulster rather than Catholic Ireland, may have twisted in his grave when he was named as the man for the top job.

To view him as just another Irish boy made good would be to underestimate his achievements though. Not only does he head a corporation, Mellon Financial, that has some $3.6 trillion (€2.9 trillion) in assets under management, administration or custody, but he is something of a business star in his own right.

He is, for example, one of just 12 people who sit on the Federal Reserve Board's Federal Advisory Council, the body that meets four times a year to advise Mr Alan Greenspan on how the economy is doing in their part of the US.

He has also been appointed by President Bush to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, the group formed after the September 11th attacks to monitor the security of America's "economically critical infrastructures" such as cyber systems.

Reared in the university town of Princeton, New Jersey, Mr McGuinn is the grandson of two immigrants from outside Charlestown in Co Mayo. His grandfather worked as a conductor on the Philadelphia trolleys, while his father was the first in the extended family to attend university after a brief flirtation with the seminary.

By the time Mr McGuinn came along, high achievement was even more of a possibility. He qualified as a lawyer and, after a term in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, worked for the prominent New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

In 1981, he was recruited by Mellon as general counsel not long before the bank ran into difficulties on the back of some high-risk loans to developing countries, oil companies and property developers.

Under a new chief executive, the bank was directed away from its loss-making wholesale lending activities towards focused businesses such as asset management and commercial leasing. Having run the legal department for a few years, Mr McGuinn was rewarded for his skills and called forward to take over corporate strategy.

In 1998, he became chairman and chief executive of Mellon Bank and then a year later was named as chairman and chief executive of the bank's parent, Mellon Financial Corporation.

His main agenda at the time was to bring clarity to the group's strategy, which had been muddied in the market by two failed attempts to buy smaller banks. A hostile takeover attempt by Bank of New York did little to help matters, despite also failing.

This meant the disposal of credit card and mortgage businesses to Citigroup and, more recently , the sale of a retail bank to Royal Bank of Scotland. The wholesale lending that had provided the foundation of the group (and had helped to found American industrial icons such as Bethlehem Steel) had by now been entirely eliminated.

"It contracted the balance sheet but to me it was stepping back to be better positioned," says Mr McGuinn.

Mr McGuinn notes that 90 per cent of the group's income now comes from fees as opposed to interest. In the first quarter of this year, this income amounted to about $1 billion, up 28 per cent on the previous quarter.

With some $700 billion in assets under management (as opposed to just administration), Mellon is the 11th largest fund manager in the world. Clients include major US pension funds, as well as private individuals seeking someone clever to mind their nest egg.

The other big chunk of the group's business comes from asset servicing such as custody and administration, with Mellon's Irish operation alone administering assets worth more than $14 billion. Custody clients of the Dublin operation, which employs 65 people, include An Post.

Mr McGuinn says he is keen to grow this Dublin business "both through acquisition and organically", even though it has already jumped from 20th to sixth biggest IFSC fund administrator in the past three years.

"There's no limit as to how big we can be," he says, showing a little of the ambition that has helped to lift Mellon Bank, and Mr McGuinn, to where they are today.