At that stage of his life, Munro did not actually know what a fund manager was, but learnt while training as an actuary at Scottish Provident.
Learning the ropes
He says: “As part of the training, they put me with the investment managers, specifically a fixed income manager, and I loved that world; the news changing every day, the fact you were measured daily against an index and against your peers, there was a score card every day, and some days you went up and some you went down. That excited me, and I wrapped my legs around the chair there, and they kept me on.”
After two years managing money at Scottish Provident, he moved to the much larger Standard Life, where he launched GARS, which is believed to be the first absolute return fund available to the UK adviser market.
Once again, he says the idea of launching the product was the result of his own experience.
He says: “At Standard Life at that time, most of the clients were in with-profits funds, and most of the allocation was to equities. The thing about those products is, there was a pre-determined return. And that was OK if equities fell for one year, but the dotcom stock market crash lasted from 2001-2003, and Standard Life went from a very solvent firm to almost bust.
"And I thought, well, if clients want a product that generates reasonable returns, but with low volatility, why shouldn’t we give that to them? It was an idea that came from the school of hard knocks.”
Absolute return funds have fallen sharply from favour with clients in recent years, but he says the prevailing market conditions of much of the past decade, with equities performing strongly, have not suited the asset class and he expects the trend to reverse.
GARS was the largest fund in the UK market, and Munro was head of fixed income and multi-asset at the company, when he quit to join Aviva Investors, launching a GARS-type product. He became chief executive in 2013.
A hint of his latent ambition could perhaps be provided by his completion of the advanced management training programme at the prestigious Wharton business school in the US.
Munro acknowledges that it is rare for fund managers, whose focus tends to be on their own asset class and markets, rather than the fate of their employer or colleagues, and tend to not have to deal with HR or IT-related matters.
