One of the most recognisable faces in the largely private world of UK financial services, Martin Gilbert has made a name for himself by being at the centre of some of the biggest deals in the city.
The 66-year old could be settling into retirement, but instead has just sealed another big transaction, as AssetCo agreed to buy River and Mercantile Group for just under £100m.
But let's go back to the beginning in order to chart his career in full.
Born into a Scottish rubber-planting family that had settled in Malaysia, Gilbert was sent back to be educated at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, before studying at the University of Aberdeen for a law degree (in the same year as Alistair Darling) and masters in accountancy.
After university, he joined Deloitte and qualified as a chartered accountant.
In 1982, he joined the investment department of local law firm Brander & Cruikshank, and a year later - with two others - undertook a management buyout of its investment department.
The new entity was called Aberdeen Fund Managers and had initial share capital of just £10,000 with £70m of assets under management.
Deregulation of the UK stock market - known as the 'big bang' - was pounced upon by the firm, which opened its first London office in 1987. By this point, Gilbert wasn't actually managing funds anymore, having moved up to run the overall business.
Of course, it hasn't all been plain sailing for Aberdeen. The departure of its largest client, Aberdeen Trust, in 1985, was a big early obstacle to overcome.
Then in 2002, the wake of the dot-com bubble's burst hitting the firm's large and leveraged store of split-capital trusts - vehicles offering different share-classes with a set lifespan of five to 10 years - resulting in heavy losses, angry consumers and the attention of city regulators.
With 19 split-cap funds, hundreds of investors lost their investments, so Gilbert was hauled in front of the Treasury Select Committee for a grilling. John McFall, committee chairman at the time, said Gilbert and Aberdeen were no better than “sophisticated snake-oil salesmen”.
During the period, Aberdeen's share price fell 97% and the firm ended up paying compensation totalling £125m - a large sum in relation to its £207m in shareholder funds. Gilbert offloaded the retail business, with £840m of funds sold to New Star in order to concentrate on the smaller margin, but less volatile, institutional market.
“Split caps were the absolute low point of my career,” he told the Financial Times. “I don’t ever want to go through something like that again, but it has made me stronger and a better chief executive.”
Fast forward to 2005 and the asset manager's size and stature had grown significantly. So too had Gilbert's confidence and connections.
That year he was a key player in the acquisition of Deutsche Bank’s UK investment management division and a related US entity, adding several billion pounds to Aberdeen's war chest.
“Deutsche was transformational,” he told Institutional Investor in 2017. “It virtually tripled our assets under management and provided a platform to market our investment capabilities to institutional investors around the world.
“The Deutsche deal also gave us the operating model to acquire and integrate subsequent large-scale businesses: Credit Suisse and SWIP.”
Even for those that survived the initial shock of the 2008 global financial crisis, many firms were struggling. Aberdeen was not, and took advantage of the turmoil to pick up Credit Suisse’s fund management arm for £250m the following year.
The so-called 'taper tantrum' in 2013 - caused by low reserves and high foreign currency debt among the emerging economies that many of Aberdeen's funds invested in - led to persistent levels of client redemptions.
However, in 2014 Gilbert swooped for Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP), buying the business from Lloyds Banking Group for £550m, increasing Aberdeen's assets to £325bn and putting it among the top tier of investment management.
Several (relatively) smaller deals followed over the next few years - FLAG Capital Management, Arden Asset Management, Advance Emerging Capital and Parmenion Capital Partners - before Gilbert's arguably career-defining deal came together.
On 6 March 2017, Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life merged in a transaction worth around £11bn, creating the UK's largest fund manager and the second-largest in Europe.
Operating under the name Standard Life Aberdeen, the newly created entity had £670bn under management upon completion that August, along with an estimated £200m in cost savings.
Gilbert became co-chief executive alongside Keith Skeoch, but decided to step up to become chair in 2019, before finally retiring from the company in September 2020 after almost 37 years in charge.
Since then, he has taken up several chair positions, dabbling in the fintech disruption with digital bank Revolut, leading the board at multi-asset firm Toscafund and becoming part of consortium that backed AssetCo’s transformation from a fire engine leasing firm to a wealth and fund manager consolidator.
With Gilbert at the helm, the latter company has gone on to make several market plays, taking a stake in River and Mercantile (before the eventual buyout), buying Scottish boutique Saracen Fund Managers for 2.75m, and paying for significant shares in Rize ETF and Parmenion.
“We grew Aberdeen largely by organic growth and acquisitions,” he told the FT recently. “That is our current strategy but at the boutique end of the market. I’ve told [Standard Life Aberdeen's new chief executive] Steve Bird ‘you’ve nothing to fear from us’.”
Outside of finance, Gilbert has also brought his executive experience and entrepreneurial nous to several other industries.
He joined the board at FirstGroup in 1989, back when it was called GRT, with Aberdeen providing much of the funding for its management buy-out from Grampian Regional Transport.
Between 1995 and 2014, he was chairman of the transport group, and during that period he attempted an unsuccessful takeover of National Express.
Among his other chairmanships, he is also chair of The Net Zero Technology Centre in Aberdeen and became chair of Scottish Golf in 2020.
A keen golfer, who apparently plays off a handicap of around 10, Gilbert is also a non-executive director of the European Tour and supported the sport through various sponsorship deals while in charge of Aberdeen.
As well as golf, he also enjoys sailing and skiing with his wife Fiona - professor of radiology at Cambridge University - and their three children.
Gilbert received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2014 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017. He is Adjunct Professor of Finance at Imperial College Business School.
Back to business, and he is a member of the International Advisory Board of British American Business, having previously chaired the UK's Prudential Regulation Authority’s Practitioner Panel, as well as being a member of the International Advisory Panel for the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
In 2020, Gilbert was also named as chairman of the Oil and Gas Technology Centre for the energy industry.
From 2016 to 2018, Gilbert was the deputy chairman of Sky, having joined the board in 2011, and in 2017 he became an independent non-executive director at Glencore.
He recently told This is Money that he will 'never' retire.
"Why would I? Experience counts in fund management - it's not like most industries where you get worse as you get older."
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