George Roche

George Roche, retiring president and chairman of T. Rowe Price, will be honored with a lifetime achievement award as part of II News' 14th Annual Mutual Fund Industry Awards. He spent his 38-year tenure building the investment management shop into a publicly-traded powerhouse.

T. Rowe has $308 billion in assets under management and a debt free balance sheet with $1.2 billion in net liquid assets as of the third quarter of 2006. More recently, Roche has led the firm to expand internationally, growing its international analyst force to more than 25 and positioning it to continue its growth in an increasingly global business. T. Rowe under Roche's leadership has also capitalized on the growing defined contribution market, most recently as a leader in the target-date fund arena with $13 billion under management as of October.

T. Rowe's strong balance sheet is one source of pride for Roche, whose focus on the long term has kept the firm from getting into the earnings estimate "game," as he called it. But, said Roche, the real credit for the firm's financial position is its investment performance. "The reason we're financially successful is because we've done a good job for our clients," he said. About 60% of the firm's rated funds have four- or five-star rankings from Morningstar.

Roche said a big difference from when he joined the firm as an analyst in 1968 is that T. Rowe's growth has turned the firm into a big business enterprise, with more than 4,000 employees and sales across four channels.

James Kennedy, T. Rowe's new president, said that T. Rowe has looked to Roche to solve some of its biggest hurdles, including a capitalization challenge that led Roche to take the company public in 1986. The initial public offering funded buyouts for retiring partners and long-term investments in the growing business.

Roche will keep his office at T. Rowe's Baltimore headquarters and assume a consultant role in 2007, though he is unsure about how many hours he will work. Kennedy said Roche already has his first project, although he declined to provide details. Kennedy expects not only to see a lot of Roche in the next year, but "over the next decade," he said. "He's too valuable to let go."

Amvescap Chief Named Fund Leader Of The Year

Martin Flanagan

Martin Flanagan, president and ceo of Amvescap, was named fund leader of the year last Thursday night by FA at the 14^th Annual Mutual Fund Awards at The Ritz-Carlton in New York City. Flanagan won the award on the strength of two key strategies: bringing Amvescap subsidiaries Invesco and AIM Investments closer together and overseeing the merger between AIM and PowerShares Capital Management.

AIM launched seven funds in April to be run by Invesco managers. The move enabled AIM to offer overseas retail funds to domestic investors, using Invesco management teams in Hong Kong and Japan.

The PowerShares union was completed in September. The union was the first--and so far only--merger between a large fund firm and an exchange-traded fund sponsor, putting Amvescap in a unique position in the market. While The Vanguard Group also offers both ETFs and traditional mutual funds, the coming together of a fund firm with more than $60 billion in assets and the second-largest ETF sponsor provides opportunities that few other firms can match. AIM's Independence line of target-date funds, launched last week, are the first such funds to invest in both mutual funds and ETFs.

The two firms have already produced joint marketing materials and cross-selling is underway after PowerShares wholesalers educated AIM wholesalers about ETFs. Emphasizing the breadth of its post-merger lineup, AIM saw its January sales up 20% over its January 2006 numbers and as of early February, had seen 17 consecutive weeks of sales higher than the corresponding week one year earlier (www.fundaction.com, 2/9). According to figures from Financial Research Corp., net outflows from AIM funds dropped from $12 billion in 2005 to $9.2 billion last year, Flanagan's first full year at the helm.

--S.M.

BlackRock/Merrill Lynch Investment Managers

Laurence Fink

Robert Doll

Laurence Fink, BlackRock's chairman and ceo, and Robert Doll, president and chief investment officer of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers worked to combine one of the three top bond managers with an equities and international powerhouse.

Doll, now vice chairman and global chief investment officer of equities at the combined firm, has said September's deal was driven by BlackRock and MLIM each being strong in areas in which the other was trying to build. The BlackRock/MLIM merger demonstrates how clients are looking for investment managers with a broad lineup, he said.

Doll said the increasing cost of distribution, investment management, regulatory compliance and technology all added to the appeal of a deal between the two organizations. "In the future, $500 billion won't be enough," said Doll.

Phoenix Duo Named Top Marketers

Stephen Gresham & Frank Waltman

Stephen Gresham, executive v.p., and Frank Waltman, senior v.p. of Phoenix Investment Partners have won the 2006 Fund Marketer of the Year Award for turning around the investment firm after years of declining sales. At a time when mutual fund firms are scurrying to get into the separately managed accounts business, the Phoenix marketing pair instead used its longtime foothold in SMAs to enter the fund business. Gresham and Waltman turned the firm's distribution pattern from 80% managed accounts to 20% mutual funds to the reverse in 2006.

The team also used a strategy of hiring subadvisors, adopting institutional funds and re-investing in ailing funds, a key to the turnaround and grabbing the attention of advisors.

Last year Phoenix launched a new marketing campaign called Small Funds, Big Performance, which helped bring in $677 million in net flows in 2006. The campaign targeted the 10,000 new advisors the firm has brought in. Gresham has said the Small Funds campaign is designed to position Phoenix as a niche fund provider, particularly as advisors look for alternatives to some of the behemoths in the industry. The campaign was the first since the firm started its strategy of adopting funds and hiring back the original managers as subadvisors and hiring other subadvisors to manage new or existing funds.

Phoenix has hired institutional managers such as Bennett Lawrence Management and Golden Capital Management. It has also adopted funds, such as the FMI Sasco Contrarian Value Fund, now called the Phoenix Mid-Cap Value fund, and two funds from Janus Capital Group that are subadvised by Vontobel Asset Management. Phoenix also adopted the Harris Insight Funds earlier this year.

Waltman has said the subadvisory platform gives the firm flexibility to fix performance and fill in gaps in the product line. "We're now looking at what's next," he said. "You can't rely on what's worked in the past." --J.S.

American Century Investments

Mark Killen

American Century's link-up with Lance Armstrong was the brainchild of Mark Killen, senior v.p., who saw Armstrong featured in a Business Week article about high-profile charity givers. The article also featured American Century founder Jim Stowers who, like Armstrong, is a cancer survivor and dedicates himself to working with cancer charities.

The campaign was not just about appearing in ads. While Armstrong features in print and television spots, he also makes personal appearances for American Century at employee and client events and meetings. The firm also tied the former cyclist into its fund line. The Livestrong Portfolios--American Century's rebranded target-date funds--were launched in May, with American Century promising that flows into the funds would determine the amount it would donate to Armstrong's cancer charity.

Last week, the firm launched its latest series of ads, one of which features Armstrong along with his daughter, Isabelle (see story, page 1). The campaign is the latest in a trend of superstars working with fund firms--last year's winner of this award was Fidelity Investments for its campaign featuring Beatles legend Paul McCartney.

Brian Barish, president and research director, and Nancy Wigton, principal and director, Cambiar Large-Cap Opportunity Fund

Brian Barish

Assets at Cambiar's Large-Cap Opportunity Fund grew by a staggering 350% in 2006, to $2.5 billion. The fund's sales were powered by its performance. Managed by Barish, it has a five-star Morningstar rating and is also rated highly by Standard & Poor's Mutual Fund Performance Persistence Scorecard.

After a management buyout in 2001, the sales focus has been less on wholesaling and retail advertising and more on centralized intermediaries. With the growing importance of fund selection units, that approach has paid off, most notably in September 2005 when Opportunity was put on an asset allocation platform from Wachovia. That deal brought in $700 million immediately, a figure that has since grown to $1 billion. The fund is also part of wrap programs at other intermediaries, including Citigroup and Oppenheimer & Co. Barish said that the fund has in the past year seen consistent net flows of $5-$10 million a week.

Curt Overway, president, Managed Portfolio Advisors, IXIS Asset Management

Curt Overway

Overway has led Managed Portfolio Advisors, the overlay management division of IXIS, to a leading position in the area of coordinating the underlying managers in a separately managed account or unified managed account. The area is becoming increasingly important with the growth of unified managed accounts, which combine all types of investments in a single account.

Managed Portfolio Advisors finished 2006 with $12.7 billion in assets. Last year, the firm brought in $2.4 billion in multiple discipline portfolios and another $2.4 billion in single strategy portfolios. IXIS has placed 62 strategies, half of them new, with Merrill Lynch, UBS and Credit Suisse, among others.

Overway credits much of IXIS' success to its flexibility in working with managers. Some managers either handle their own trading or do not give up their investment models to the firm. Managed Portfolio Advisors has also pioneered innovative income-oriented strategies for baby boomers and has expanded distribution overseas to banks and mid-size institutions. Overway oversaw the introduction of the Active China Strategy, an index-based separate account strategy focused on China.

Putnam Investment's Implementation Of Markit's Trade Processing Platform

Diane Doering

The move recognized the derivatives processing issue--and took the solution one step further by implementing the platform for both manual and automated trades. The backlog in the credit derivatives space had been publicized in 2005, but Putnam had not reached problematic volumes at that point. "It was a confluence of things that got us to thinking about it," said Jacques Longerstaey, director of risk management. "We were active in derivatives, particularly fixed income, and the idea that a backlog would occur was starting to show its ugly head,"

Diane Doering, lead on the project, said the firm wanted to use as few platforms as possible. "We were really looking for a system that could handle ... manual and automated trades," she said. Putnam uses the platform to match its paper confirms for over-the-counter trades as well as its trades though the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. Putnam implemented the platform in January 2006.