CLIENT STORY

IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN WILSON, CO-CEO OF NINEPOINT

John Wilson, co-CEO, Managing Partner, and Senior Portfolio Manager at Ninepoint, and Ultan Geraghty, co-Head of Aladdin Client Engagement for the Americas, discuss how leveraging technology enabled rapid implementation of new solutions and scalable growth—while responding to market dynamics and maintaining a competitive edge.

Explore how Aladdin supports asset managers Explore how Aladdin supports asset managers

Read the full transcript below

[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

John, great to see you. Thank you again for taking the time.


[JOHN WILSON] 
 
It's great to be here.


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

I wonder if we could start with a little bit on the evolution of Ninepoint, the origin story and your role within the asset management industry here in Canada.


[JOHN WILSON]

Sure. Ninepoint spun out from a public asset manager back in 2017. What we're looking to do here are unique strategies that give them a return stream to diversify them away from, say, market beta in a way that still has an attractive level of return at a much better level of risk. 


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

We're living in truly extraordinary times. Could you maybe share a little bit around how you guys are navigating the current macro environment?


[JOHN WILSON] 

So, that's just the nature of the business, and we've tried to build our organization in a way that allows us to adapt quickly, to be flexible, and that's been true in our platform. So, we were very early adopters of the cloud, and that flexibility has allowed us to respond quickly, implement new solutions quickly, drive new portfolios quickly. So, that's been a key enabler for us.


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

How do you view the role of technology within the sort of heartbeat of the firm?


[JOHN WILSON]

I think it’s more of a cultural thing. You have to decide that it’s an advantage to understand where technology is taking us. We were very early with Aladdin, and now we’re there with AI. Again, it became a part of how we think about the business every day, not just “do the technology and forget about it.”

We're an asset manager, we want to be best-in-class as an asset manager. So, what we look for are people that we feel we can trust, that have leading edge ability, and scale. And then as a smaller firm, we can leverage that scale. And what we, I think both discovered is it was really value added, if anything more so for a small organization. One, we could do it quicker and so we got to those benefits faster. Again, we're constantly in dialog with Aladdin and BlackRock on what the development timeline is and what the future looks like, and that really helps our business. When we see things coming in the future development plan and then we can start thinking about how are we going to use that? How is that going to help us?

It's been great for our business. It's really allowed us to achieve those goals we had about being flexible and responsive and building a system that allows us to scale.


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

Can you talk a little bit around how maybe Aladdin has helped you to navigate some of those pivots that you've had to make in the market?


[JOHN WILSON]

When we looked at Aladdin originally, we had multiple systems that were connected with typically custom software, and we had a small development team in-house that managed that and maintained it. You know what kept me awake at night were things like reliability, future proofing. How do we keep at the leading edge of what's available in terms of running our platform? And both of those were really solved with Aladdin for us. 

We were able to leverage the massive development team, so we know it's going to be maintained, it's going to be always moving at the leading edge of the industry. And then on top of that, it allowed us to access leading edge risk analytics. Having all of those risk analytics available in the front office on the same system with everybody was really key.

And then finally, it gave us the opportunity to show our clients how our portfolios add value. We can actually use Aladdin to say: “look, if you add these strategies from us to your allocation, look what happens to your risk profile.” So, all of those things for us were really key drivers for why we did it.


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

How do you balance the needs of technology from the investment side with the need to achieve operational scale? 


[JOHN WILSON]

Certainly, pre-Aladdin, that was a core challenge for us. The front of the house, the investment managers, the portfolio managers, a lot of that work was done in Excel. That caused a lot of issues. And then from an operational standpoint, scale is a big issue. To get onto a scale platform was always core to our view. And that's why as soon as we spun out from the public company, we went right to the cloud, gave us a line of sight as to how we could grow the total platform. Getting onto Aladdin, and we started that process almost right away. One big, pervasive problem that you tend to have when you have multiple systems is: is everyone looking at the same information? So, with a single system, now everyone's running off the same data, looking at the same information. That solves a lot of problems.


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

A lot of the AI conversation is often around productivity and efficiency, but on the investment side, I guess you guys are very innovative. You're one of the first to the forefront in the adoption of digital assets as a product. Can you maybe expand on some areas in which you see products evolving within that space as well?


[JOHN WILSON]

Digital assets is a great example. We brought in what we felt was leading talent. And we just wanted to learn. That's typically how we think about new technology developments like we are with AI right now. We're just trying to learn. And so, through that process, we just find more and more opportunity of ways we can use that technology, or our clients can access that technology, or maybe it's an investment opportunity for our clients.


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

The asset management industry continues to undergo a lot of change, a lot of M&A continuing to happen. How do you see the industry evolving not just here in Canada but more globally?


[JOHN WILSON]

I guess I would look at it through two lenses. On the one hand, scale will be important. I think that's been a trend that's been in play for a while. The second element is just, it used to be a much simpler business, right? People invested in equities and fixed income long-only. Now, you know, there's the whole hedge fund phenomenon, but also multi-asset, private assets, digital assets. The business has become more complex, but that brings a lot more opportunity.

 
[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

John, we've covered a lot. We've gone through the origin story right through some of the extraordinary times we're living through. Could you maybe share a little bit around the growth projection of Ninepoint over the next two to five years?


[JOHN WILSON]

We spoke earlier about the extraordinary events that continually happen in our industry. But we're, at our nature, we're optimists. We think the nature of humanity is: we overcome, we progress. Things generally get better over time. And so, we plan our business around that thought process. And we think we can continue to add value to client portfolios and continue to show them how we add value. And Aladdin has been a really core part of how we do that.

So, our projection is that we're going to double or triple the size of our firm over that period of time. We think using scale platforms like cloud, like Aladdin allows us to do that pretty seamlessly. Really happy with the kind of clients we work with, the size of our business. But growth is exciting for our people and we're going to keep driving for it. 


[ULTAN GERAGHTY]

So John, thank you for taking the time. I think this has been really insightful – a journey around Ninepoint as well as a little bit of the Canadian industry. Thank you again for placing your early trust in us.


[JOHN WILSON]

Thanks for everything you've done for us.