Man's gotta do: Man Group's FD, Kevin Hayes

Photography: Anton Hammerl

In replacing the man who replaced the man who replaced hedge fund titan Stanley Fink, Kevin Hayes is the clear CEO-in-waiting at Man Group (no pun intended).

“The CEO role is certainly something I’m interested in,” Hayes says. “You always want to have an FD who has those aspirations. Succession planning in organisations is more important nowadays and we’ve seen examples in many large FTSE companies where that planning is not completely apparent.”

Hayes knows being coy on the matter of his aspirations would be a waste of time.

His ascension to that role at the world’s largest listed hedge fund manager would simply be the continuation of a habit of Man FDs becoming CEO there. Fink was FD before becoming CEO; the current chief executive, Peter Clarke, had been FD before a stint as deputy chief executive and his appointment as Fink’s successor in spring 2007, the same time Hayes was brought in from Lehman Brothers to replace him. Should he want to carve out a long-term career at Man, Hayes can take heart from the trajectory of Harvey McGrath, Prudential’s new chairman, who, in his 27-year career at Man Group, served as its finance director, chief executive and chairman.

Spookier still is the parallel between the formative career trajectories of Fink and Hayes. Both took the road less travelled, training in law and moving into accountancy practice (Hayes is a barrister and a solicitor of the High Court in his native New Zealand; Fink studied law at Cambridge before qualifying as a chartered accountant with Arthur Andersen), then into business and later to their respective FD roles at Man. Both have three children and, cutting heavy-set, imposing figures, dressed in navy pinstripes ­ Hayes with added braces ­ they even look alike.

Canny resemblance
Here, one can’t help but conclude, is one finance director positively ripe for a headline role, though for the moment Hayes sees the way he and Peter Clarke work together as invigorating. “Strategy is very interesting, but execution is really important to getting momentum and a very important component of what I do is that execution; it tends to be more internal,” he reveals.

“Peter and I have a symbiotic relationship. We’ve both been out this week on investor relations ­ I’ve been covering clients in the US and he’s been covering clients in the UK, which works well. Peter has a very long-standing relationship with many of the shareholders so sometimes it’s good for them to see a different face and hear a different perspective.

“But I wouldn’t say there’s anything in Peter’s world that, at the moment, I need to do to feel fulfilled. There’s an awful lot in my own world and current responsibilities that mean I still feel challenged.”

This is a man whose taste for a challenge has seen a business administration graduate from Wellington, New Zealand, make partner at Ernst & Young’s New York operations inside six years (aged 34) and CFO for Europe and Asia at Lehman Brothers nine years later. His departure from Lehmans came just 18 months shy of its implosion, his only inkling that something was wrong a sense that things were changing, of decisions being made that he did not like.

“I was sitting there watching Bloomberg that weekend [it has declared insolvent], seeing the commentary coming across, then finally on Monday when it filed for Chapter 11… that was devastating,” he recalls. “When you know the number of people that worked at Lehmans who had their entire personal fortunes tied up in the stock ­ and it suddenly, overnight became worthless ­ that’s horrible. I’ve thought about whether I could have predicted that. There’s nothing I could tangibly say that I identified… or if, perhaps, people could have necessarily identified the solution ­” he trails off.

His career at Lehmans ended with a two-year stint in a role created for him that carried a fancy title, but a chunky mandate: to make the business bigger, to extend the business’s roots outside its core US, European and Asian markets. It took him out of finance, making use of his cost-culling experience in various parts of the world but sating his thirst for a meaty challenge, hiring from rival firms, running teams on three continents, establishing the culture of the expanding businesses and spending time in India to establish Lehmans’ offices there.

“India is the most incredible place you could ever go to ­ – the smartest people, the most enthusiastic, everyone wants to learn,” he recalls. (The European and Asian fixed-income businesses Hayes helped to build were bought by Nomura last September.)

“There was a certain amount of frustration in the organisation about getting scale out of the infrastructure. I’d never done productivity and process improvement and it is quite a science ­ there is a skillset that’s required. I spent the first two months talking to a lot of people about how to do it, hired some very capable people with consulting backgrounds ­ a lot of Six Sigma people from JP Morgan, people who really knew how to do this, with a totally different skillset from mine ­ project management people who write lists. Things that I don’t do,” he laughs.