Across the aisle

John Burke's DNA runs back to Dublin, Ireland. His old man plied his trade in the sales and advertising game for wines and spirits - originally Irish whisky, of which there are almost as many barrels ageing on the island today as there are living souls to drink them.

Burke's father's work took the family to the US for a few years when he was a young child and then to Perth, Scotland.

He stayed through secondary school before rocking up to the University of St Andrews for a master's in history and economics.

"That was a really fabulous place to go. There's no one living at home, it's always been a campus university - everyone came from afar, there are a lot of foreign students... it's a great place to meet people and make friends because you're on your own," he says.

Bubbling social atmosphere aside, Burke speaks fondly of the classroom. History and economics had long held his interest, each discipline sharpening the other.

He says you can't really understand major historical events without also grasping the economic forces behind them, noting that most revolutions are blown open by poverty, unmet expectations, or regimes burdening their populations with punitive taxes.

Toward the end of his studies, Burke found himself drawn to finance over history. The latter, he felt, demanded too much reading and time, something that would dull the shine of his university experience. Meantime, the UK economy, in the depths of recession at this stage, was being pulled out of the doldrums by the financial services sector in London.

Graduate programs in consultancies, banks, fund managers, and law firms were snapping up the lion's share of graduates, including Burke.

Burke got picked up by a company that would later become Accenture, moving to London in 1996.

He later joined Mercer Investment Consulting, which he says was a fantastic way to "window shop" the funds management industry from all angles, meeting equity, bond, and hedge fund managers of all stripes.

When he joined Mercer, its UK investment consulting arm was still in its infancy, with about 30 staff and a leadership team drawn mostly from actuarial backgrounds rather than "investment people," he says.

The region's investment consultancy sector, however, experienced explosive growth following a regulatory push triggered by the collapse of Robert Maxwell's media empire.

Burke says the regulator responded by mandating professional investment consultants be included in every trustee group.

"That's when the upskilling of pension funds across the UK became very prominent, and that led to the growth of businesses like WTW, Mercer, Hymans Robinson..." he says.

Looking to move from consulting into equities, particularly global equities, and spurred by a relationship with an Australian girl - now his wife - who wanted to head home, Burke joined AllianceBernstein as an investment specialist.

Burke spent four years at the firm, cutting his teeth on its domestic funds and products, before his remit grew to include Asia. At one point, he was living out of his suitcase, meeting clients in Korea, Manila, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

He says it was "a massive learning curve" after years spent observing the workings of the funds management industry from the outside.

The constant travel schedule starting to wear thin, and with a baby on the way, Burke jokes: "I destressed my life by moving to a friendly German investment bank, Deutsche Bank."

He spent four years at Deutsche Bank as a director in the structured solutions team, offering products to super funds including equity and fixed income protection strategies, asset-liability modelling, FX hedging, fixed return, and smart beta investing.

"When I was there, a colleague [Josh Heller] and I realised there was a gap in the market," he says.

"The funds were getting much bigger and bringing in more skilled in-house people, but they weren't using a lot of derivatives - and if they were, they may have had access to only a limited number of banks to trade with. So, we left Deutsche Bank on the same day to set up a standalone business within Challenger: Challenger Investment Solutions.

"Its sole purpose was to do derivative overlays and trades for super funds," he explains.

Burke says he never imagined managing large sums of money, but he and Heller were trading billions each year in swaps, options, and other derivatives for about 10 super funds.

After five years, Burke was itching to "switch on another part of the brain," moving away from trading and investing in favour of focusing more on management. The opportunity arose to become global head of Fidante.

He says the business went through "a huge amount of change in a short period of time," with funds under management growing from about $62 billion to $82 billion in two years.

Burke joined multi-boutique asset manager Bennelong in May 2023, attracted by its privately owned structure, roster of managers, and scope to expand the platform.

He also says Bennelong is "taking active risk where you need to take active risk," pointing to its mid-cap and ex-20 strategies managed by Bennelong Australian Equity Partners and its Emerging Companies Fund, and more recently, Canopy Investors.

With it being "hard going" with super funds - "who are great clients," but whose wants have "moved on massively" - he says future growth will come from the wholesale space.

"That's where Bennelong's strength has always been," he says.

Burke says Bennelong has launched some compelling offerings for clients, including an insurance-linked securities fund that invests in catastrophe bonds, introduced last year in partnership with Leadenhall Capital Partners.

"No one's seen their insurance [premiums] drop recently - whether it's home, car, or anything else. That fund taps into those premiums, which I think is interesting as well, because if you look at Berkshire Hathaway's results, for example, they're making a lot of their money out of insurance and reinsurance in non-typical areas," he says.

Looking ahead, however, he sees growing demand among wholesale clients for diversification and solutions that provide "a fairly steady level of income as they mature."

Bennelong partnered with Allspring Global Investments to launch a global income fund this month, and Burke also flags offshore private credit and semi-liquid private market structures as areas Bennelong is actively exploring.

"We're very keen to make sure we bring in high-quality products that address that," he says. fs