Influential fund manager Helena Morrissey has announced her decision to join Legal and General Investment Management as head of personal investing, a newly created role designed to make investment more accessible for individuals.
Her decision to leave her former job as CEO of Newton Investment Management after 15 years at the helm shocked the financial world last year. She hoped to move to a more “meaningful” role, which she has found at L&G:
“I wanted a role where I could make a real difference to how the industry engages with its customers.
“LGIM has the potential to be not just a market leader in this space but to develop a genuinely different approach.
“We are looking forward to building a savings business with strong and direct connections with our customers, including those who have never really thought about investing before or find existing offerings off-putting.
“We are looking to get to the point where we are all using technology to access funds in the same way that we use Amazon to access books. Our focus will be on building a service, not a sales process.”
Elaborating on her hopes to get more woman to invest, Morrissey said: ‘All the research shows – and it resonates with me – that women tend to be more goal-orientated when it comes to money.
“Pay off the mortgage, put a child through school. While men on average tend to want to make money.”
Morrissey has been an influential driver of gender equality in the city, and set up the 30% Club in 2010 with the aim of making
The mother-of-nine is known as an influential champion of gender equality and set up the 30% Club in 2010, with the aim of achieving a minimum 30 percent of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies. The figure currently sits at 27 percent.
The mother-of-nine is also Chair of the Investment Association, the trade body for the UK’s investment managers.