GC Friday Interview: Mercer’s Jessica Hynes on Expansion

Jessica Hynes has been promoted to head of global custody consulting for the U.K., Europe and Middle East at Mercer ‘s Investments arm. She talks to Global Custodian about the expansion of the business, which sits within Mercer Sentinel, and its plans for 2015.

GC: Why is your move significant in light of the expansion of Mercer’s custody business?

JH: Mercer itself has a number of major business lines; we have Talent, Health, Retirement and Investment. Investment is the place where Mercer Sentinel sits. Mercer Investments has 2,000 consultants worldwide, including in America and Europe. Mercer Sentinel is the post-trade operation specialist that supports Mercer investments, consultants and clients. We are also global and we have 50 professionals in three main locations; Chicago, London and Sydney.

Within Mercer Sentinel there are three teams, which are: transition management, operations /due diligence and custody. The custody practice in Chicago, London and Sydney is currently restructuring and there ‘s a new guy called Greg Korte, who is setting up the Chicago practice. I’m setting up the London practice, for Europe and the Middle East. Peter Baker just joined Mercer in Sydney as well. So it’s all getting restructured right now and we’re putting the major pieces in place. Over the years we’ve been distracted by whatever trend is happening in the industry, and we would run after it. I think we’re really looking now to concentrate on strategic integrating and looking at pure custody consulting with operations and procurement, and the types of things that clients are asking us about; securities, lending, fund accounting and administration and longevity. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with local government, LGPS (Local Government Pension Scheme), in order to become the specialist for LGPS clients. We just took the London Council to a procurement to support their new software scheme. That’s a big story as well, which I don’t think has been announced yet, but you’ll probably hear about it soon. We do a lot of support work with the LGPS: not only do we do their procurement support, but we also do monitoring for a lot of the LGPS clients, including operations and monitoring. But we’re trying not to get distracted by regulations, which is such a specialized area, and one that we do not have the resources to be able to keep up with. So we’re moving away from trying to advise people on regulatory aspects, and just sticking really to what we know best, which is operations and custody.

GC: What are Mercer Investments’ plans for 2015?

JH: We’re quite mature in the UK. But we’re also looking to expand our third party client base, particularly in the Middle East. Ben Gunnee worked throughout 2014 on the Middle East presence, working for Mercer Investments and drumming up a lot of business for Mercer Sentinel in the Middle East. I’ve been traveling up to the Gulf quite a bit. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a lot more opportunities there. And then we also work with our investments and consultants on other continents. We usually have a lot of activity in Scandinavia, Stockholm, Oslo, Germany, Amsterdam, Spain and Lisbon. We are very project based and we don’t definitely know what’s coming down the pipeline. But last year there was a little bit of a lull, so we’re expecting business to pick up this year. At the moment we’re looking to expand, but we’re waiting for the deals to materialize as well.