Investec Asset Management secures former Schroders IT leader

Matthew Oakeley is back in the asset management financial services market as CTO as Investec Asset Management.

Oakeley was with the Schroders financial services organisation in London for 10 years, stepping down in March 2015.

Kim McFarland, Chief Operating Officer, Investec Asset Management said in a statement: “Hiring Matthew Oakeley underlines our belief in the importance of developing a best-in-class technology capability to support our delivery to clients. Building on our global operations platform, Oakeley will not only bring significant experience to our team, he will also enable us to evolve in order to meet our clients’ needs.”

Investec Asset Management is a specialist investment manager for institutional and individual investors and its employees are equity stakeholders. Investec Asset Management was established in 1991 and is now managing approximately US$118bn for its clients. The financial services business employs over 165 investment professionals.

Oakeley joined FTSE 100 listed Schroders in 2005, and within a year was leading the replacement of the company’s portfolio accounting system – the crucial platform supporting its asset management business – a two-year project completed on time and on budget just as the 2008 financial crisis began.

The accomplished choral singer told CIO in April 2014 that by 2010 the re-platforming of the business enabled Schroders to come out of the recession a stronger organisation, with the IT in position to support the growth of the business and become a data-driven operation.

Oakeley transformed not only the technology Schroders used, but also the make-up of the technology team. He restructured the organisation into Business Consultancy – providing cross-company analysis to support project activity; Investment Management IT – supporting the business platform for front, middle and back offices; Distribution IT – supporting CRM, web, email, online marketing and analytics; Corporate IT – supporting Finance, Legal, Compliance, HR, Risk, and IT Production – supporting the main business applications and IT Infrastructure. This new structure ensured that his Schroders team was providing the essential technology, but crucially playing a key role in the information strategy of the asset bankers.

“The analytics teams are exploring how to track the connections between events: how does an article about one of our products in the press or a marketing campaign correlate to subsequent visits to our websites or flows across our funds? If you look at other sectors telcos, for example, they have impressive source data to work with – we are just at the start of this in our industry,” he said in an interview.