Duane Green is building something

Duane Green took his time to find his current role. After 20 years with Franklin Templeton, and seven years as President & CEO of the firm’s Canadian operations, Green spent over a year finding his next job. In that time, he says, he talked to as many people as he could and reflected on what might give him excitement and fulfilment in his work. He took a wider view of the industry and learned that what he wanted to do next was to build a team.

Just as he was coming to that personal realization, Green was connecting with Jill Barber, then-newly appointed as Chief Distribution Officer for Aviva Investors, the investment management arm of the UK-based insurance giant. Barber told Green about her goals for Aviva Investors, the creation of three global divisions for the distribution of their institutional and retail investment strategies. She hired him as CEO of the firm’s new Americas division, telling Green to build a continent-spanning network that would begin with the establishment of a meaningful presence in the Canadian market.

“As much as Aviva Investors is new to the America's region, we're not a new firm. We’re introducing these capabilities, which may feel new to the Canadian market, but our track records are there. We've got multi-decades of doing what we do, and we are very well capitalized in terms of Aviva Group, our parent,” Green says. “I like to jokingly say we have the opportunity in the Americas region of being almost the best financed startup you're going to find in our industry.”

Green explains that the firm’s approach to the Americas in general, and Canada specifically, will be to segment the market between managing assets for insurers, managing assets for institutions, and managing assets for retail wealth managers. He outlined exactly how he plans to build that retail channel and what Canadian advisors might expect to see from Aviva Investors as they expand in this market.

While he admits that the Canadian retail channel is a crowded space replete with asset managers, Green believes his firm still has a compelling value proposition. He believes that advisors need more institutional style asset management capability, whether to provide income, manage risk, or give investors access to private markets. Rather than building another team of wholesalers to knock on advisors’ doors, though, Green wants to partner with existing asset management platforms to distribute Aviva Investors’ strategies.

Green’s team will seek partners on the retail distribution side of the industry. He says he’s ready to compete with other asset managers but argues that a more collaborative approach to existing strategy distributors can be more beneficial for Aviva Investors as it seeks to grow. Achieving that, he says, will take time and investment into deeper relationships with those distributors to ensure that they are getting a set of products that complement their existing offerings.

“When I look at the distribution landscape, and I know how heavily skewed it is towards the bank, insurance companies and the strong independent distributors out there. I know I can partner with them a lot better than compete with them,” Green says.

Because Aviva Investors is a newcomer in Canada, Green says the firm doesn’t have the history, baggage, legacy product, or other issues that can plague a new approach to the business. They can instead build from the ground up. In his first ten months in the role, Green explains that he and his team have held several conversations with those potential distribution partners, seeking to understand where they could add value for retail investors.

Much of that value add, Green notes, may come from the firm’s expertise in institutional asset management. He has long observed, among others, that retail clients are getting more sophisticated and that advisors now need asset allocation strategies that more closely resemble pension plans. He sees his own firm adding value to this evolution through a mixture of thought leadership and in striving to create and provide strategies that are best in class. He notes that while Aviva Investors is looking at three sleeves of distribution, those areas will communicate directly with one another, allowing for expertise on the retail side to be leveraged to serve institutions. Green hopes that Canadian advisors will see more from his firm as they work towards providing solutions that suit them and their clients.

“Advisors play such an impactful and important role in ensuring Canadians' future financial security. And we want to do what we can do to partner with them to better equip them to serve their clients,” Green says. “I want to keep an open mind to seeing what they can bring to the table and how we could work together. But I know full well that we've got to earn that ability to partner with them.”