The firm lost a lot of good people. A lot of the blame should go to the deadwood in Distribution. Don't get me wrong there are a few good people in that division. However, it has become filled with lazy, useless, superficial salespeople who are more akin to a used car salesman than a salesperson at a premier asset manager. We're in this mess I reckon due to quite a few of them. My experience in Australia I've seen a lot of sales people that were just full of cr-p (excuses all round). When performance is good they claim the wins. Then performance of funds are bad suddenly it's not their fault. Make hay while the sun is shinning! And claim credit for the sun going up! Senior salespeople here in my opinion are just about managing up and attempting to portray themselves as good salespeople but are just lazy and superficial. All sizzle and no sausage! The only 'win' of note they've had was a cakewalk where the client had previously allocated to TRP in a previous firm. My mother (no asset management experience) could've closed it. Get rid of the deadwood that's impacting everyone else!
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@OP I agree. Start with that short, fat, bald, middle manager in Baltimore in USI. No one likes him, he’s such a kiss-a-s. JNL.
@OP Some GD teams are running lean. People have left and not got replaced. I'm not sure what the set up is in Australia but elsewhere I don't think there's a lot of fat in the Distribution teams for some time.
It's a bit of a broad brush statement. In Intermediary a lot of flows will naturally be fund performance related. I think the real issue which you're alluding to is that there is a senior individual in the Distribution team in Australia that is atrociously terrible at their job and has pretty much sc--wed the whole office. They are pretty much a glib confidence man who has a silver tongue. Slippery salesman who is a pathological liar where lies spill out of his mouth with such ease. They seem to say a lot of impressive things but is so full of sh-t, lacking integrity and accountability. Sitting in an ivory tower and wanting to do as little work as possible is what they're aiming for. Before that individual joined there were Billions in inflows and AUM in the office grew substantially by several Billion dollars in a few years. Now as pointed out the only real substantial new client inflow was something easy a nana could win. Now look at what's happened to the office.
I've worked in another asset management firm and your comment could get well have been about the sales team there :-).