June 15, 2022 | bloomberg.com

Markets

Wellington’s Jean Hynes Speeds UpHiring, Unfazed by Bear Market◼ CEO plans to add 500 employees at $1.2 trillion manager◼ She’s making a big push into sustainability, private assets
by Erik Schatzker
June 15, 2022

Bear markets tend to herald leantimes in the investment business.
Not at Wellington Management.
Rather than retrench, Chief Executive Oﬃcer Jean Hynes is planningto add about 500 people in the next
two years. She sees the wipeout instocks and bonds as an opportunity
to expand while rivals face potential
cost cuts.
“We are very clear on our strategy
and where we want to make investments,” Hynes, 53, said in a Bloomberg “Front Row” interview at
Wellington’s oﬃces in Boston. “Theproﬁts of the ﬁrm will be down thisyear -- the markets are down -- but
we will continue to invest.”
Wellington can resist the pressures of a prolonged sell-oﬀ because, unlike most asset managers
of its size, it’s a private partnership.
That gives the ﬁrm, which oversees$1.2 trillion and has 3,000 employees, a degree of freedom shared byfew peers, among them VanguardGroup, Fidelity Investments andCapital Group.
As she ﬁnishes her ﬁrst 12 months
as CEO, Hynes is drawing on lessons from the ﬁnancial crisis almost
15 years ago. When publicly traded
companies such as Franklin Resources Inc. and Legg Mason scaled backin 2008 and 2009, Wellington expanded in Europe and Asia. Hynes,
then rising through the ﬁrm’s ranks
as a health care investor, had moved
her family to London.
Since her promotion last June frommanaging partner, Hynes has madeintegrating environmental, social andgovernance analysis into Wellington’s
65 investment teams a priority.
Hynes said she thinks sustainability will have an even more transformative impact on investing than
two of the biggest shifts of the past
decade: the rise of passive funds
and the embrace of factors such as
growth and momentum as discrete
sources of returns.
Just screening for ESG scores
won’t be enough, she said. That’s
why Wellington is developing expertise in climate risk and energy
transition -- because they’re potential sources of outperformance.
“Sustainability will change thestructure of ﬁnancial markets,”
Hynes said. “We don’t think it’swoke. We think it’s part of -- a very,very important part of -- studying
the opportunity set and the risk setof 5,000 companies.”
Already, the ﬁrm has 75 employees dedicated to sustainability, as
well as partnerships with the Woodwell Climate Research Center andthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
Wellington has evolved before.
While owning bonds helped save it
during the 1929 crash, the ﬁrm eventually specialized in stocks. Hynes
recalled that by 1991, the year shejoined as an administrative assistantwith an economics degree from
Wellesley College, Wellington was“known as a US value equity shop.”
Her predecessor CEOs led an

expansion into ﬁxed income. Hynes,
as part of the hiring push, is setting her sights on private assets
and liquid alternatives -- where she
thinks there are more opportunities
to generate excess returns than in
public markets.
Wellington has only $8 billion in
private assets, most of it in growthequity and biotech. Hynes said shewants that to reach $20 billion, inpart by extending the ﬁrm’s expertise in credit and real estate.
In long-short strategies, where it
manages $30 billion, Wellington isinvesting in technology to augment
returns and focusing on recruiting.
Earlier this year, she brought in a
ﬁve-person team from hedge fund
Shelter Haven Capital Management.
“We should be able to build multistrat products out of those diﬀerentfunds,” she said. “We’re doing someof that already, but more to come.
Could we build more market-neutral
funds? Could we build market-neutral sector funds? Could we build awhole group of sector funds?”
If there’s one obstacle, it’sobscurity.
For years, Wellington drew littleattention, operating as a subadvisor-- managing money for ﬁrms such
as Vanguard -- and serving institutional clients. Now, it needs a brandto attract investing talent and to sell
Wellington funds through privatebanks.
“We’re not a household name,”
Hynes said. “Having a public proﬁlehelps.”

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