Aberdeen Reviews

"Circling the drain" is really the best way to put it. Stephen Bird has no interest in running an investment business so he's winding it down and stuffing it with costs to make a sale more appealing (we know from recent news reports that he tried that sale and it wasn't approved by the Board). It seems like chairman Douglas Flint can't bear to admit he brought the wrong guy in as CEO. The only way abrdn has any hope at this point is if both of them go and someone comes in who (a) knows how the investment business works, since Bird clearly doesn't. (b) Is willing to be objective about the problems. No more superficial "improvements" that lead nowhere please. This used to be a great place to work. Now it feels very much like a dead end. Everyone sees that and talent will continue to leave when there's an opportunity to do that.

Since the merger, AuM and hence revenues have been steadily declining. Senior leaders blame market conditions but this doesn’t explain why the company is falling behind its competitors. There’s no credible plan to turn this around beyond hoping for more benign market conditions, so instead there’s been seemingly constant rounds of cuts, redundancies and restructurings. Stephen Bird’s arrival as CEO seems to have coincided with an identity crisis in the company, exemplified by the “abrdn” rebrand and the three “vector” model (my bad, they’re called “businesses” now). The ii brand is now the group’s favourite child, but the board and CEO seem to be confused over what to do with the company’s legacy as a primarily institutional asset manager. The CEO’s contempt for staff is thinly veiled. The tone was set shortly after he joined with his comments criticising bonuses “spread around like peanut butter, and there is a company in-joke that Mike Bloomberg spends more time on the office floor than Stephen Bird. Not to mention his advocacy of selling off the Investments vector/business (apparently it’s at the core of our business now, though it’s hard to see what has changed). Salaries are stuck at pre-pandemic levels, that were by the company’s own admission, already below industry median. This is despite the highest sustained period of inflation in two generations. The board chooses to prioritise maintaining the dividend at a level above earnings, over a plan to reward and retain its best people. Parental leave and redundancy benefits were recently halved, being announced just after the end-of-year townhalls and employee survey. At best the timing of this announcement was ill-considered, at worst it was cynical. All these factors combine to create a toxic atmosphere, as bourne out by the latest employee survey results. The people who survive the cuts and reorgs are encouraged to push work onto others and cut corners where possible. Performance management is an afterthought. Ultimately the culture comes top-down from the CEO, and it shows.