Home ListingMarch 31, 2015

Albourne CEO to Step Aside

An Albourne co-founder and one of <em>CIO</em>’s 25 Knowledge Brokers is to stand down in August.

Reported by Featured Author

Ruddick_Simon Simon Ruddick, AlbourneSimon Ruddick, one of the founders of investment consultant Albourne Partners, is to step back from his role as CEO in August, the company has announced.

Ruddick, who launched the company in 1994, is to pass the baton to John Claisse on August 11, but remain on the three-person executive committee alongside him and Guy Ingram for a further five years. He will also continue to serve as the chairman of Albourne’s board of directors, the company confirmed.

Calling Claisse an “extraordinary colleague and very dear friend,” Ruddick said: “John is completing the journey of the intern who had to build his flat-packed desk on his first day of work to managing a firm with a global footprint and very big dreams of how it can help its clients and try to improve the efficacy and efficiency of those markets that it is involved with.”

Albourne was placed third by last year’s Forty Under Forty cohort in a ranking of their top consulting firms. The firm works with clients exclusively on alternative assets: hedge funds, private equity, real assets, and real estate.

The outgoing CEO created Albourne after trying various areas of the financial sector. In 2012, as part of CIO’s 25 Knowledge Brokers series, Ruddick said he had a dream to “make money alongside—rather than from—clients”.

He first tried investment banking, then launched a hedge fund. But neither was the right fit. “The hedge fund was a good first step,” he told CIO in 2012. “But you have to stick with what you are doing. You are a ‘diversifee’ rather than a ‘diversifier,’ so you get stuck in a box.”

The final attempt was to create Albourne, a pure-play investment advisory that charges a flat fee regardless of client size and does not negotiate supplier discounts. Large clients get “outrageous value,” according to Ruddick, while the smaller ones can access the top-quality funds and research usually reserved for the biggest and richest investors.

The company has grown to serve 262 clients, which hold more than $350 billion in alternative assets, from 12 office locations. The company has also been nominated for several CIO Industry and European Innovation Awards.