Tyndall lays ghosts to rest

One of the first to join high flyers Clayton Robard in the mid 1980s, Ken Brewer, has joined Tyndall, the group that rose from the ashes of Clayton Robard.

One of the first to join high flyers Clayton Robard in the mid 1980s, Ken Brewer, has joined Tyndall, the group that rose from the ashes of Clayton Robard.

And one of the first tasks the new head of retail distribution has at the Royal & SunAlliance subsidiary is to finally lay to rest the Clayton Robard legend, which he feels has been an albatross around the neck of Tyndall.

“I really want to knock the whole Clayton Robard thing on the head,” Brewer says. “And the only way to do this is to address the issue head on. I have set myself the task of going out to the industry and explaining the difference between the Tyndall of to-day and the Clayton Robard of the mid 1980s. A lot of water has passed under the bridge.”

Brewer was the 22nd employee of Clayton Robard when he joined the group as a trust accountant in 1984. In his four years there, he witnessed the group’s meteoric rise in fund performance and funds inflows. At the pinnacle of investment performance for the group in September 1987, the group took in more than $93 million. This was a huge feat for a fund manager at the time and is still a remarkable figure today.

However in October 1987, the glory came to a crashing halt with the massive down-turn in stock markets around the world. Clayton Robard fared worse than most others and the wounds from that month stayed with the company until it was painfully re-structured a few years later.

Brewer says he wants to set the record straight by letting the market know that the past is the past and Tyndall today bares no resemblance to the Clayton Robard he left in 1988 to join GT Funds Management as finance director.

“There are a number of people who got burnt in the fallout from the 1987 crash,” he says.

“The difference today is the investment process. In 1987, the discipline simply was not there and most investment decisions were based on the opinions of one person. Since Tyndall adopted Comparative Value Analysis (CVA) in the early 1990s, disci-pline has been the lynchpin to the investment process.”

“In fact, that was one of the great attractions of joining Tyndall. It is so much better to go to the market with an investment process that is true to label.”

Brewer will also draw on his extensive marketing and distribution experience in his new role at Royal & SunAlliance. He has spent the past ten years with the likes of GT, Jardine Fleming and Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP). His last role at BNP Eq-uities involved managing the growth of the stock broking group following its acquisi-tion of Prudential Bache. In his three years at BNP, the private client adviser team grew from 23 to 75, including three financial planners.

“However, I found that my natural home is in funds management,” Brewer says.

At Tyndall, as at BNP, Brewer will build a marketing and distribution team from scratch, however this team will be considerably smaller than that at BNP.

He says the distribution focus will be concentrated on external financial planners, al-though he says he will also increase the service standards for the Royal & SunAlli-ance tied agents.

According to the chief executive of retail and superannuation at Royal & SunAlliance, Dennis Fox, Brewer is the final piece in the jigsaw of the retail business’ executive team.

This includes the signing of Bob van Munster as head of research, who starts this week. Van Munster has moved to Sydney from Melbourne where he was the head of industrial equities at County Investment Management.

The key appointments follow a great deal of uncertainty over Tyndall’s investment management after the takeover by Royal & SunAlliance. Research houses Assirt and InvestorSource put Tyndall’s funds on hold after a number of key executives fell vic-tim to the restructure following the takeover. InvestorSource has since lifted its hold recommendation.

And with further communication with the market, Brewer suggests uncertainty about Tyndall will soon be a thing of the past.