In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Schroders CEO: Navigating industry shifts, family ownership and embracing risk

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

In this episode, Nicolai sits down with Peter Harrison, CEO of Schroders, one of Europe’s largest asset managers with nearly 200 years of history. Peter shares insights on navigating a rapidly evolving investment landscape, from the shift toward private markets to the impact of AI and technology on asset management. He also dives into the challenges of the UK market, reflecting on how changing regulations and global competition have reshaped the industry. Tune in for Peter’s thoughts on building resilient teams, risk taking and his advice for young professionals.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.The production team for this episode includes PLAN-B's Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was conducted by Sara Arnesen.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, today we have the great pleasure of having Peter Harrison on the show. Peter is the CEO of Shrodus, one of the biggest asset managers in Europe. And amazingly, Shrodus has been in business for nearly 200 years. Peter, great to have you here. Thank you, great pleasure. It's also quite fun because Schroders is one of the longest standing partners we have in the fund, in the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. We have relationships going back to roughly 25 years. Yeah, nice.

It's a great privilege to run money for you. Yeah, absolutely. So what's the, you know, only 45 out of 1 million companies exist for a hundred years and you've been doing it for 200 years. What's the trick? So I think the key is committed ownership. We've got a family backing who takes a 20 year view of where we need to go. And because of that, the business has changed and evolved and the family, we've

been in lots of different businesses in the finance sector throughout that time, but we've continued to change. And I think that's only possible if you've got a committed long-term ownership structure which allows that change. If we do the last 10 years, what are the biggest changes you've seen in investment management? Huge. Yeah. So massive growth of passive management, huge growth towards privates,

a collapse of fees. So just to follow for the listeners, private is like private equity, passive is index funds. Absolutely and private debt. The world is moving away from public companies towards private companies. A revolution in governance, huge agenda on climate, collapse in fees. So wholesale trade, the industry is going through a major disruption. A while back, there were lots of English companies in this industry, you know, really, really grand names doing very well, huge tradition. And then the Americans came and ate your lunch. So look, I think the two things, the capital markets moved towards America.

That was the first thing and they started with a huge domestic bias. But I don't think the UK companies evolved and part of what we've been in the business doing is trying to change the business to where the fast flowing water is today. There's very, very different markets and if you don't change, you're not going to be in the fast flowing water. Why are the Americans doing better? Well I think the size of the domestic market makes it able to create scale and this is a scale business at the end of the day. You need to invest hugely in tech and data and if you cannot shrink to grow and I think too many companies saw the disruption

and they thought actually we're going to shrink, we're going to try and cut costs. We took the view we needed to invest to grow. And it was a different strategy, but it's, I think, the only way through it. And the Americans, being American, they tend to want to invest to grow. But it's not only the asset management, it's also the banks, like the merchant banks. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. But are the Americans working harder? Are they cleverer?

What is it? No, no, they're not working harder. They're not cleverer. But they do have some innate advantages of scale to start with. They had more partnerships type structures, which I think is a very good structure in an asset management business, because you're sharing 100% of the pie with people in the business rather than a portion of the pie. And I think we've also seen this very big change of the growth of privates. And in private markets, the bigger you are, the bigger the mode.

Are you sure they're not working harder? So I heard a story, which I actually think may be true. When the Americans came to London, they had the widest margin and the most profitable day on part of the week on Friday morning, because the English guys had been out drinking on Thursday night. And so there were just wider spreads, less keen competition, and the American guys were

just like in there Friday morning, bang, hitting it. I don't know, if I walk around this building, this place is full. So I can only speak for here, but then we've been successful during that period. What's been the most important things that Shroters have done lately? Look, we've pivoted towards privates, we've pivoted towards wealth, we've spent a lot on technology, we've spent a lot on sustainability and what that means. And I'm sure we should talk more about that.

But for me, the ability to move and innovate and being really tough on ourselves to change. And I think that requires cultural change and it requires new capabilities. So it's required a lot of change during the last 10 years. Now how does the decline of the UK capital market play in here? So if you go back 15 years, the UK has one of the largest pools of domestic savings in the world. And we the largest pools of domestic savings in the world.

And we regulated that out of existence. So it basically bought government bonds and stopped taking risk. And we put consumer protection at the center. And that shrank the UK as an equity market considerably. Saw huge outflows over the last 15 years. And then we put in a corporate governance code, which said, conflict between shareholders and companies is a good thing.

And every league table was the more times you vote against management, the better. And those two things were unhelpful for listings, they were unhelpful for thriving domestic capital. Those are now changing and people are going back towards more risk taking, they're going back to a more constructive environment. But I, so the listed market has struggled. I think what's happened at the same time is London risk-taking, they're going back to a more constructive environment.

So the listed market has struggled. I think what's happened at the same time is London has boomed with private markets, with hedge funds, as a centre for people coming together. We've got some fantastic life sciences. The problem is it's foreign capital which is driving those businesses, not domestic capital. So the returns are not going to UK savers. And I think as a country, that's a big problem.

But it's also probably the constituent is of the stock markets, right? So the US market has compounded at roughly twice the rate of Europe over the last 10 years, of course, due to a lot of, you know, much more tech companies in the UK, more mining, oil. Yeah, we've got the companies of 100 years ago, and they're not the companies that are driving the growth of the future. And I think creating a listings environment where people want to and creating an environment where management want to be listed in London has been a big part of the change which has been going on over the last few years to say, this

is unacceptable. You cannot have your best companies going and listing overseas. How important is the salaries? And board salaries, CEO salaries, a lot more scrutiny in the UK. It's a huge amount of scrutiny. I think it's this notion that there's a conflict between shareholders and management. And for me, the best businesses are grown by great management, but good alignment with shareholders. And the more agency problems you get, the more people don't aim at creating great businesses. And I think that's being part of the UK problem. What does Brexit do to this? Well, Brexit was just, it undermined two things.

It undermined confidence in the UK as a place to make long-term decisions. And it created two or three years of complete hiatus. And then after Brexit, you had Boris Johnson's government, you had a whole set of challenges around Liz Truss's budget and the Giltz crisis. All of a sudden, the UK as a serious counterpart in a place to invest started to decline.

We've started to see that correct, but says scars take a while to heal. Now the effort to reboot the pensions industry to get better outcome for pensioners, how is that going? Because you've been part of some of these committees. It's been a big effort to change. I think we've done a couple of things. We've changed all the listing rules and changed a lot of the structural stuff. You're about to see a big set of changes come through in the corporate governance environment and a return to comply or explain as a way of how do you know if a company doesn't

follow the rules can do they get the opportunity to explain why they're doing it differently and I think that's that's going to come through helpfully and you're getting a freeing up of a lot of the capital which is previously just put into you know risk minimization we have in the UK 300 billion in tax advantage cash savings and virtually no financial advice. Everybody sits in cash rather than taking risk. Well, if you don't take risk, you don't earn return. And that's the UK's problem. We put consumer protection right at the centre and killed risk taking.

Is there a danger that in order to attract companies, you loosen up on the rules and regulations to the extent that it becomes wild west? Well, that's the argument that a lot of people will make. The other question is if you take no risk, you don't get a return. And so I think the answer is you have a set of rules, and if companies abide by those rules, they can list in the UK,

and then it's for active managers to choose which they want to own and which they don't want to own. And I think the UK has always been good at active risk taking. And I think you slightly careful that you don't set a set of rules which are so prohibitive that no one wants to be here. And that's where we were five years ago. That's changed. Do we need a unified European equity capital market? Yeah. And will we get it?

No. Why not? Too politically difficult. There's too much stress within the European experiment to see that convergence come together. If we had it, what would you do? Well, I think you create a big enough single capital market that it starts to be competitive against the US.

The great, the challenge of the last few years has been that we used to have London, New York, and one or two other markets. Now there are probably 15 challenges to be a global financial market and Europe needs to act, get its act together and enact its size. But it's so fragmented and there's so many, so many bits of arbitrage. I mean, if we just take, we had a set of rules that came out called MIFID, which was a, sounds really geeky, but actually there was a really, really pernicious changes that took place in the way a lot of research was done.

But every country interpreted them differently. And as a result of that, you got more fragmentation and you get ultimately atomization and the US will carry on growing. So MIFID was an effort to get the clients to pay separately for research. But that was one part of it. It also was hundreds of thousands of pages of reporting, et cetera, which was, you know, sits in a vault somewhere. I have no idea whatever happens to it. From an asset management point of view, are you happy with the government so far?

Oh, yeah, this new government, I think they've picked up the baton of needing to change and understanding that growth is important and understanding the environment for growth and industrial strategy is important. So that bit seems to be coming through. But it's very early days. The government is tough and it's really tough when there's no money. And in the UK there is no money.

How do you balance growth and higher taxes? You mentioned the private market or private equity and so on. What kind of role is that going to play for individuals who save for retirement? I think it needs to play a much bigger role. Why? Well, because a lot of the future is around how we fund climate transition, how we fund synthetic biology, how we fund AI. Public markets are not naturally good

at A, disruption and B, funding change. So you're gonna see that innovation come from private markets. And if we don't embrace that and we hide in those companies of 100 years ago, those new returns and that disruption will only be a cost to end savers rather than a benefit to them. So I think there is a big change required. I mean, public markets are shrinking really quickly. The number of companies that are delisting is down, what, 40% over

20 years. The stock in trade of a traditional public markets investor, your clients, our clients is shrinking. The availability of alpha is shrinking. They have the ability to outperform markets. So for me, those are really big issues that as the frog quietly boils in the pan, don't get talked about enough. And I think one of the big changes we're going to see

is wealth markets, which don't get talked about enough. And I think one of the big changes we're going to see is wealth markets, which don't traditionally have big exposure to private markets, are going to move much more into private. And you're seeing it in the States, you're seeing it in the biggest families. I mean, you cater for private equity, you also cater for wealth management, right? So this is a relatively new thing for you. Yeah, and the last, we've done wealth management for many years.

We've made it a lot bigger over the last 10 years and we've doubled the size of the company and that's mainly been through growing our private business and growing our wealth business. AI, how is that going to change the way you do things? Everything. In what ways? Well, I think it fundamentally changes the landscape

of the companies we invest in. In the very short term, we will spend a lot of time trying to do things better. In the probably far more quickly than we realize, we will find we do things very, very, very differently. And the moment we're all thinking about the better bit, but actually the real change will come from when we do it differently.

So I think the first place we'll see a major change is in wealth, because my sense is that people will turn to their beautiful AI assistant who will know them better than anybody and ask them for wealth advice in a way that they currently ask people. And I don't believe our portfolio managers are different from any other industry. If AI is helping understand the human genome backwards, the microbiome backwards, it can certainly help you become a better investor. I think it's beholden on us to make sure those tools and that data is in front of our portfolio managers when they make decisions. Moving on to investment philosophy, is there a Schroder way of running money?

No. There is a Schroder set of philosophy about how you create great teams and how you take risk. But our philosophy is you create individual markets require different treatments. So if you're investing in China, you need a different approach, but you almost certainly will have a relatively small team with great tools. You'll be led by brilliant people.

You'll grow people internally rather than try and hire them in. So now you are on how to build good teams. How to build good teams. Okay, let's do that. So how do you build good teams? So first thing, you need brilliant leaders of those teams. You need to give them great tools. They need to be the right size. They need to be the right size.

They need to be near their local markets. And you need to give them space to get things wrong because great investors don't get it right every single day. Then they might be wrong for three or four years at a time, and you've got to be willing to put your arms around them and support them. But the critical thing is you understand the risks they take and they're good risk takers.

And you've got your head around who is managing their way through that and the path dependency of returns. So we are invested with some of your best teams, right? What would you say they have in common? What do great teams have in common? Huge consistency of people, openness to external thinking. They look out, they don't look in, and they're great risk takers. What is a great risk-taker? They understand the risk-reward equations, and they understand when they change, and they understand why they've been wrong in a way that is... You can be wrong in China because state-owned enterprises are doing something because of some government stimulus,

or you can be wrong because you've just picked the wrong company, or you've got a... The company, the motor's disappeared, and you end up clinging onto it for too long. You need to understand the price action and how the business is changing and be willing to change. And some people get stuck, others move, and it's the ones that move and are able to adapt

and hold on to a consistent philosophy. And so often you see people wavering and if you see people wavering, the chances are they won't be able to navigate through long-term change. One of the pros and cons of not having one way of running capital because Fidelity, I guess, got one way of running capital. The capital has got one way of running capital because Fidelity, I guess, got one way of running capital. The capital has got one way of running capital. Well, capital's got several ways of running capital

because they give it to lots of individual teams and then they're very clever at the way they aggregate it up. But I think for me, it's the accountability. So you've got that ability to look at a team and say, our oil price forecast doesn't come from one central person who, and then put it into the whole system. And when it goes wrong, blows up the whole system.

So it creates a business resilience that is stronger. But I think that accountability of a team who is job it is, and they can see everyone in the team, they all know who's accountable for what. When you're trying to do that on an organisational scale, it's really hard to hold that accountability and alignment for long periods of time, particularly through change. And what you tend to see is those companies

that have a whole organisation investment process can go through long downward spirals because the organisation starts to question its own raison d'etre. And I think in a world where we need to be very adaptive, the ability to have small teams adapting is a lot stronger. Now you've got to give them great tools, you've got to give them great data.

What are great tools? Well, so for me, when I first joined this industry 35 years ago, our competitive advantage was being able to key in 10 years of reporting accounts into a spreadsheet to build a two-year earnings model. Right? Yeah. That doesn't win anymore, does it? Today, that takes about two seconds to do that. But there is a huge amount of unstructured data out there telling us what's going on in businesses, what companies are really doing, what the supply chains look like. That unstructured data takes a lot of getting and

processing and bringing it out. Those are the sorts of things I mean by great tools. The joke I always have is that Bloomberg has something like 100,000 functions, and a great portfolio manager might use 30 of them. And that's not the right answer. How do you get the right information in front of your investors so they make great decisions? How do you train people? You grow them.

Mentorship. I think we're in apprenticeship business and that requires a lot of mentorship. It requires a great recruitment process at the beginning and it requires the ability to move people through a system and gradually give them accountability. So when I joined as a graduate trainee, you'd spend time, you know, I spent a lot of time as an engineering analyst

and then I could go on and do another industry and bit by bit you learn your craft. I'm not a great believer that we are good at bringing in rock stars from the outside. There are businesses that do that incredibly well. You know, the Citadels and Millenniums do that. That's not us. Let's move on to your leadership.

What's been the main management lessons for you as you have moved from being an investor to becoming the CEO? It's tough. The best job in our industry is being an investor. So that's the first hard bit. And you have this crisis moment where you don't turn on your Bloomberg in the morning,

you turn on your emails. Were you a good investor? No, not good enough. And it was the realization I wasn't a good enough investor. Is it the Peter principle? You rise to your own level of incompetence in a hierarchy or something like that. So the first thing was getting over being an investor

and not trying to drive from the back seat. The second was understanding what sort of leader I was, because you don't really know that when you start on the management journey. And what kind of leader are you? Well, I've discovered that I'm a, connecting with the organization And what kind of leader are you? Well, I've discovered that I'm a connecting with the organization and trying to drive the hearts of the organization as much as the minds of the organization

has ended up being the style that I've done. I'm passionate about innovation. I spent my time, paid my way through university writing code, so I'm a bit of a geek. So for me, getting the innovation, being really consistent about your strategic vision, just being resilient and not be banged off course, but making sure you take the organisation with you. Because the problem in most businesses is the huge layers of permafrost that don't think change

has got anything to do with them. And how do you bring those people through and create those new capabilities? How do you melt permafrost? I think culture change, so great teams, right, is the difference between a good company and a great company. And great leaders within those teams will drive that change,

but you need to shine daylight into dark corners. It's the best disinfectant. And how do you do that? Well, part of it is creating an open and honest environment. So, let's say we make an error on a client account, right? There's two ways of responding to that. First is the obvious way, which is how do you learn from it. And the second way is finger pointing

and all the rest of it. If you create the environment which says, we wanna learn from this, people start, most people wanna come to work to learn. And I think you've gotta create that learning environment and that trusting environment. And once you do that, we're not a particularly big company, we're 6,000 people.

We can be trusted. Well, we are 700, so we think... Okay, you look at us and think... ...you know, 6,000 is a heck of a lot, you know. Have you been bold enough? So if I look back, what's the thing I wish I'd done more of is be more bold. And in what ways should you have been more bold? So we should have done more private markets earlier, because compounding out, we should have probably been more willing to acquire more teams

and not do as much organically. And I think I look back the things that- But you have acquired quite a lot. We have acquired quite a lot, but we acquired small, because I didn't want to destroy the culture. And so for me, because the challenge I think is that public market culture and private market culture are really different.

And can you get them to coexist in the same organisation successfully is hard. And that you get them to coexist in the same organization successfully is hard. And that was the thing which you've seen ruin many companies. So I said, we're gonna work really hard at this, but we're gonna go slowly. With hindsight, the disruption in our industry has been way quicker than anyone thought.

Well, one of the things you bought was part of a casino, which is where I started. Yeah, absolutely. Which is where I started my career in, well, you bought it in 2013, part of a casino, which is where I started. Yeah, absolutely. Which is where I started my career in, well, you bought it in 2013, part of it. And that's where I started straight after school. So, and that's doing pretty well, right? It's on fire.

It's growing, it's probably the fastest growing wealth business in the UK. It's got, and it's got all the characteristics. It's got strong culture, it's got great investment performance, and it cares deeply about its characteristics. It's got strong culture, it's got great investment performance, and it cares deeply about its clients. And if you have those three things, actually businesses will carry on performing

for very long periods of time. Do you still have the Queen as a client? I couldn't possibly comment. In a short period of time, you will pass, you know, the baton to Richard Oldfield. Do you think that'd be difficult? Very hard. Why?

Well, look, I've been in this industry 35 years. I started here as a graduate trainee. I might've gone elsewhere, but I will miss this. It's a very special company and I will miss it massively. And you feel a great sense of indebtedness to be, it's a privilege to run a company that you start your career in. Now, if I were to play devil's advocate a tiny bit here,

so whilst you've been the CEO, asset under management have grown a lot, right? More than 100%, but fees generally come down, right? Because there's more, well, there's generally pressure on fees, costs gone up, profits down, and the market capitalisation is down compared to when you started. Just how do you look at these various things? So we're crossing, so we started with a traditional equities business, which has gone through huge disruption. And everybody who had a traditional equities business 10 years ago has seen a

huge change. And many of those businesses are down 90% or actually don't exist anymore. So what we've done is invested heavily in those new businesses and we're crossing a valley. So as a traditional business has come under pressure, we've grown those new things. And as you've seen our results, the pace of growth of those new things now outstrips the decline in the old business.

So as we cross the valley, the compound maths does your work for you. But it takes a long time. And we were never gonna be able to tear up the really strong foundation that we had in that traditional business, it would have been wrong to. So for me, it was gonna be a long transition.

We took the view that that was the right way to make the transition. But if I look at us against our peers, I think we've done a really strong job. But I totally take the point that at the end of the day, shareholders want alignments, better returns. I just realized I asked a pretty stupid question, whether the Queen was still a client. I suspect she isn't. Well, no, I didn't want to put you right on that. But I could change the Royal Family. One of the highlights of my time here was coming to open our building and showing around, which was one of the legendary moments.

Yeah, she opened it, right? Yeah, she're right. Yes, you're right. Moving on to culture. So family still owns 44%. And you said that was the key to surviving for 200 years. Just what are the disadvantages of having family ownership? Cool. Are there any? So, no, I think the key is,

it creates a huge capital discipline, but it also has a, creates a blockage in a way, because you don't naturally want to dilution per se is a lot, lot harder to do mentally if you're a family that's held onto. So, our shares in issue today are virtually the same as they were in 1959. So that's the only negative. Everything else is a positive. But you see that ability. So Bruno Schroder sat around our boardroom table for 60 years and he said to me pretty well at every meeting, get it right on a 20-year view. Now you still have two family members on the board. Yeah. But if we hadn't have had that license to change,

I don't think I would have had the license to start the transition and the inflection that we've done because we had to transform. Otherwise, we'd have been one of those businesses that was really struggling and not investing to grow. Are you 100% confident that it's right to be independent? Yeah, I am, actually. I mean, it's an industry where the scale is getting more and more important. So our biggest competitors, Blackstone, BlackRock, have got hugely bigger in this period.

But if you want to be an active alpha manager, scale is not everything. Doing a good job for your clients is frankly the most important thing. Now in interrogation, you added actually. Yes, I think it is actually. Actually it's a qualifier. And it means that you are normally not 100% sure. What are the things that make you less sure about this? Well, I see the industry is going through,

everybody's talking about who they merge with and all the rest of it. So it is a very active debate in our industry today as to how people are gonna get to scale. And the most common thing is people merging, and everyone's up for sale. Our view has been that you can navigate that by investing for growth, growing these new businesses,

and seeing your way through. I'm acutely aware that's a controversial statement. Most people disagree with it. So I think you do have to qualify it. But for us, we can achieve it because of the family background. Would it make sense to merge some of the UK players? can achieve it because of the family background. Would it make sense to merge some of the UK players? If you're some of the smaller players,

you probably do need to merge yourself away. Because if you're a 50, 70, 80, 100, 200 billion business, you're not viable because you can't invest in the data science, you can't invest in the AI. But at 770, you think you're big enough. Look, what's different about our 770 is that it's all active and it's all private and it's all wealth. It's all high fee earning rich businesses, not got a big chunk of passive in there. So I think that it's a much richer mix of businesses than some of the

businesses which look bigger than us, but frankly they're all passive. Moving on to sustainability and ESG, what do you make of the recent swing in appetite for ESG? Well, first thing to say, it's been politicised. So you've seen this huge geographic diversion. Yeah. And you've absolutely have passed peak debate. I mean, so a lot of people don't want to talk about it now and you've seen it, but I think in boardrooms and people's awareness of the importance of climate, I don't think that's debated at all.

So what companies are getting on and doing is very real. It's just people spend a lot less time talking about it. So how do you think it will develop going forward? So I think the first thing is it's gone from hand-waving to data. And in our industry, there is a price to pursuing sustainability. So we have to understand that if we want to be good at this, and we are, we're in top three of doing it, that comes with a ticket. So a lot of people have said, we don't want to pay that price.

The second, I think, is that we will get more and more regulation and more and more fragmentation of regulation around the world. And that is a pain in an industry which is about global scale. So you've different interpretations in Japan to Korea to China, et cetera, which all difficult. But if you come in a different way,

companies report gap profits, right? But different companies put a different cost on the external environment. So if you're a tobacco maker, you create cancer. If you're an oil company, you create carbon emissions. If you're a soft drinks maker, you create carbon emissions, if you're a soft drinks maker you create diabetes. We treat all those gap profits as the same. The assets are not the same, but the impact adjusted profits of businesses are really very different and I think society will increasingly look at our businesses

and say if you don't make profits the same, we need to think about investment in a different way because the real impact adjusted profits of a people's portfolio differs. And asset managers sit there between asset owners like yourself and asset creators and companies and I think it's our job to shine a light on what's the cost of delivering that performance and if we can't shine that light, we're failing in our duty. You are the fifth largest foreign player in the Chinese market. How do you see that going forward? So China's going through a major correction post-property crisis. You've seen huge growth in cash deposits in banks as the wealth effect of the destruction is coming through.

But you're also seeing a huge massive energy transition going on in China. And I think you will see a return to risk taking at some point. I mean, the Chinese have had a huge benefit of moving people from the countryside to cities, and that's given them a productivity boost. That productivity boost isn't enough to carry on into the future. They need financial productivity and to achieve financial productivity, they probably need external players in to help show them what good financial productivity looks like. And a strong position running wealth, fund management assets, private equity assets, I think is really additive for our future growth.

But today, it's losing us money. And one of the bets that I've made that hasn't been right has been the scale of that bet. But if you take a 20-year view, you'd be delighted with it. But in a world with increased geopolitical frictions between the US and China, for instance, what are the dilemmas of being a large player in China for you? Well, it's really interesting, isn't it? Most US players have stopped talking about their Chinese investments in their public statements, but they haven't pulled back from their activities on the ground because this

is one of the largest savings markets in the world. It's a huge, it's second only to the US. Have you stopped talking about it? No, we've said very openly about it. Jens Stoltenberg, who recently stepped down as the secretary general of NATO, he talks more vocally about thinking about defense and security rather than just doing business and profits. Have your priorities changed?

I think the reality of our business is we will be a taker of the geopolitical environment. We have to be sensitive to it and governments will take whatever defense decisions they want to make. I personally think that there is a huge opportunity for savings growth in China. And we should, as a West, want to be engaging with that. We want to engage with them on the green transition. We want to engage with them on corporate governance, just as we do anywhere else in the world. And we should be, if we don't, if we, we've got two choices as a society. We either walk past on the other side of the road

and say it's all too difficult and it's horrible, or we cross the road and help. And I think being part of the solution has always been to my mind the right way of doing it. It's sometimes a lot braver and harder, but I think we don't engage, we're gonna get what we deserve. How does India look to you?

Looks great at the moment, but let's be quite clear, right? Go back 10 years ago, China was booming and India was nothing anybody wanted, and now it's the other way around, and I'm sure in 10 years time, it will move again. But the growth of the middle class, the innovation that's going on in India

is phenomenal, but in our industry, it's a super tough one. We've got price control from the regulator, great savings. But in aggregate, we cannot own 100% of an Indian business, which is a challenge. But we've got a big position in China. We're also number seven in India. And the rest of Asia, how do you see that? I think you've got to look country by country.

I mean, overall, it's clearly growing very strongly, but I think that the most interesting one is the corporate governance change going on in Japan. That is a sleeping giant of domestic savings corporates who've never really got the message. And bit by bit that is changing and that excites me. Talking about excitement, what do you read? A lot.

What? One of the greatest privileges is I'm a judge of the FT Book of the Year. So I read a lot of books about business. So anything which is about society today for me, so the brilliant book just out, The Longevity Imperative that says we're getting ourselves thinking about longevity

completely the wrong way. Jonathan Haidt's book about the impacts of mobile technology on children, you know, the ravenous about food systems being broken around the world. Those are the really big issues I think we face. Come on, give us some more titles. You read all these. Oh, Supremacy on AI. Amy Emerson was our winner last year, which you obviously covered in your podcast, which was a brilliant book on learning from failure. And I think there's so much great,

I mean, there's so many brilliant books being written. I just don't have enough time to read them all. I agree. Yeah, we do review a lot of them on LinkedIn, so please check it out there. Who's been important in your life in terms of a mentor? I think mentors are really valuable. And I've got several. One particular mentor took me out the other night and he said, what are you gonna do? And I said, I'm not sure if I'm gonna have an executive thing. He said, let me tell you something.

You're no spring chicken. You shouldn't be thinking about being an executive in your mid-60s. Give it up. Go and do something valuable. And you need people sometimes. And what would that be? And so for you to do something more valuable now after. And what would that be? And so for you to do something

more valuable now after November, what would that be? I'm going to spend six months doing all the things that I have never done before. And they are? Look, I'm going to go, I spend a lot more time fishing, I'm going to spend a lot more time on the water, I'm going to spend a lot more time reading, and then I'm going to go and do some crazy things like grow flowers and go bird watching, you name it. I'm going to go and do some crazy things like grow flowers and go bird watching, you name it. I'm going to do all this. Sounds like typical English activities.

Well, I'm going to spend six months. Fishing, bird watching, plants. I'm going to immerse myself in other stuff and out of that, I hope to come up with what I should be doing afterwards. I'm not going to stop doing things, but what I am clear about, I'm not going to do something executive. Sounds like a really good plan. Peter, lastly, what is your advice to young people? So I think if I reflect back,

do not assume that climbing the greasy pole is the route to being happy. So a lot of people look at the societal structures and say, I wanna be more senior in organization and all the rest of it. If I look back, societal structures and say, I want to be more senior in organization and all the rest of it. If I look back, I should probably say the portfolio manager. If I think that they've got to engage, I think a lot of them don't engage.

And I think a lot of them need to look outside of the algorithms that they are victims of. And they get fed the same stuff and the people stay in a very narrow pipe. And I think, how do we, we I mean it's a mentorship program how do we help break that cycle of saying there's one view of society because I think people need to think very differently about who they really are and what they really want out of life and I rather than just saying it's about the next

promotion yeah well Peter big thanks for being here today and a big thanks to you and Schrodus for the partnership we've had for 25 years and for the money you have made for Norways Bank Enhancement Management. Thank you for the trust you place us. Thank you. Great pleasure.