John Murphy has run the Boston Marathon, so the OppenheimerFunds chief knows the importance of pacing. Since taking over the U.S. retail fund giant in mid-2001, he has presided over a sprintlike 26 percent gain in assets, to $161 billion.
But the ginger-haired Murphy, 55, is taking the iconic fund firm, which is owned by its managers and Mass Mutual, into overseas markets and the institutional side of money management one deliberate step at a time.
OppenheimerFunds opened a Tokyo office in February and a London outlet last month. Both, however, are modest in scale. The caution is warranted: U.S. firms’ track record at breaking into Europe is patchy, and parlaying good fund results into institutional business is a strategy that remains largely untested.
Nevertheless, to Boston College grad Murphy, gathering assets abroad is a logical progression. “As an investment organization, we have thought global for a long time; now we are acting local,” he says. In pursuing institutional accounts, Boston-based OppenheimerFunds is just being pragmatic.
“The retail market is incredibly competitive in Europe,” says Murphy. “There’s little point in our trying to take on well-resourced incumbent players.” By contrast, he says, “pension funds are looking for high-alpha products, and we have some mutual funds with outstanding track records.”
Murphy recently hired Adrian Gordon, who was a marketer at Barclays Global Investors and before that a consultant at Mercer, to lead the institutional charge in Europe.
“It makes good sense to add to the business and revenue mix,” onetime lacrosse player Murphy says. “And our fund managers are agnostic as to the client -- their job is to outperform, whether for a mutual fund holder in Des Moines, Iowa, or a pension fund in Amsterdam.”
