# Record plc: Strategic Growth, Business Transition, and Strong AUM (LON:REC)

- Link: https://www.directorstalkinterviews.com/record-plc-strategic-growth-business-transition-and-strong-aum-lonrec/4121226639
- Published: 2025-11-20T11:50:02+00:00
- Author: Amilia Stone

**Record plc (LON:REC) **Chief Executive Officer Dr Jan Hendrik Witte caught up 
with DirectorsTalk to discuss H1 FY26 financial results, including its £110.3bn 
in Assets under Management, a shift into new asset classes, and the rationale behind
strategic changes in pursuit of long-term growth.

**Q1: For the benefit of those who are new to Record Plc, could you explain what
the company does?**

**A1:** Record is a specialist asset manager and, in a sentence, what we do is we
focus on best-in-class solutions for large institutional investors. What we mean
by that is, when we say best-in-class, is that we’re able to address exactly the
requirements of large investors in a variety of fields, but by our size.

In terms of assets under management, we just exceeded $110 billion in AUM across
clients globally and we trade just over $1 trillion in volume every year. So, we’re
very used to catering to large clients in large mandates with the average client
size north of $1 billion.

What clients come to us for is solutions and structures which they cannot easily
find elsewhere and where we are of a size, where we are large enough to deliver 
these best-in-class solutions or these somewhat customised mandates to them at these
sizes. But we’re still small enough, nimble enough to listen and adjust to exactly
what it is our clients need.

**Q2: You talked in your results announcement about Record as a company in transition.
What was the rationale behind that? What are the new business lines that you’re 
moving into?**

**A2:** The business goes back to the early 80s and was founded as an FX business.
So still today, a lot of the volumes I just mentioned, a lot of the trading we do
is in FX derivatives.

We do a lot of FX hedging for large pension funds, for example, where as a pension
fund, you tend to have your obligations to pensioners in your home currency, which
is where you’re based. If you’re invested internationally, if you have a large international
portfolio, that creates a degree of currency risk. If there’s a mismatch between
the investments in foreign currency and your obligations in your home currency. 
So, originally, if we go back to the start of the business, we’ve always helped 
clients to look after that kind of risk in the most cost-efficient and most robust
way. That is how the business started and it’s still a lot of what we do today.

However, in recent years, to touch on your question, what does it mean we’re a business
in transition? We have started to use what is a phenomenal operational engine in
the background of all of this.

To put this into context in terms of the AUM numbers and the trading volumes, we
have an exceptional operational capability in catering to large investors. In recent
years, we have more and more deliberately used that engine combined with our flexibility
to tweak it and adjust it to exactly what our clients’ requirements are, to also
offer products in other asset classes. So, we’ve moved into EM local debt, for example,
a number of years ago, we’ve launched a large infrastructure equity fund, and we’ve
also done a lot of work in the credit space.

So, while to the outside observer, these might look like very different or distinct
areas, what they have in common is that in all cases, we’ve set up a fund, we’ve
set up a vehicle, we’ve created a portfolio which was tailored exactly to the needs
of a large investor in the way that most other people would have struggled to do.

In turn, that allows us to move into new fields at relatively large sizes. If we
take the infrastructure equity fund, for example, while infrastructure is a new 
domain for us, we moved into that space with €1.1 billion of commitments on day 
one.

That’s really the direction where we’re becoming more and more active and where 
we say, we’re now transitioning the product range to offer these new products more
routinely.

**Q3: Profits were down in the first six months of this financial year, what was
behind that?**

**A3:** In addition to the risk management activities that we do, we do offer a 
number of alpha strategies, particularly in the FX space and towards the end of 
last year, we had a number of those mandates terminate, which weighed on profits
this year which we announced as of last year but it really showed in the numbers
only this year. So, they have come down slightly, which is in line with how we present
the business.

If we categorise the products of the business today, then we say there’s, on the
one hand, risk management products, which allow us relatively stable and predictable
returns from a shareholder perspective.

There is the private market space, which holds almost everything else that’s not
risk management—things like EM debt, infrastructure equity, credit, private equity—
that’s all in what we call the private market pillar.

Lastly, we’ve got an absolute return pillar and the products in absolute return 
tend to be slightly more volatile as a return driver for us, because it’s more frequent
that investors change their mind about where they want to be invested or where they
see return opportunities.

So, we saw some outflows in FX Alpha towards the end of last year, which explains
the reduction in profits there but this year, we’ve again seen inflows. It’s just
part of running the business and part of what we expect in the particular product
category.

**Q4: With the changes you’re making that you were talking about earlier, what will
Record Plc look like in five years’ time?**

**A4:** When we started to set out on the strategy which we’re now delivering, which
is a number of years ago, we said ‘what will we need to do’, ‘what would the business
need to look like for us to have a $1 billion market capitalisation?’ So, we really
worked back from that in saying how can we use what’s unique about what we can do
today, to use it in the best possible way to achieve that kind of market capitalisation.
That’s how we set the strategy which we’re now pursuing.

We’ve now been on this path for a number of years in that, for the first couple 
of years, it was a case of ‘how do we do this?’, it was a case of deciding what 
would be necessary. We’re now firmly in transition so we now see the new product
areas which we’ve added to the business, which now complement the traditional parts
of the business, we now see those contribute. We’re now in a position where we say
the strategy, the way we set it out, is working.

So, five years from now, we would expect to really see the benefits and see that
plan the way we set it out come through. I’m not going to put a number on that, 
but we would expect the business to be much, much larger than it is today, with 
a much larger market capitalisation. Based on what we see today in how the different
parts of the strategy contribute, that appears to be working.

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