Week in Review - December 19, 2023
Executive Shuffles: MFS, Natixis, Calvert, Fidelity
Welcome to the last News Brief issue of 2023. We will resume publishing the newsletter on Jan. 9.
At some firms, a new year will mean new executives – or at least introducing successors.
MFS and Natixis, for example, each announced new chief executives. At MFS, Edward Maloney, the firm's investment chief, will become CEO at the start of 2025. He succeeds Michael Roberge, who has held the top spot since January 2017. Before that, he spent two years as co-CEO.
Philippe Setbon, meanwhile, has taken the helm at Natixis. Setbon was most recently CEO of Ostrum Asset Management, a Natixis affiliate. His predecessor, Tim Ryan, will leave the French firm.
Calvert has also named a new head: Von Hughes. Hughes joined the Morgan Stanley affiliate last year as head of its institutional solutions group. At the start of the new year, he will replace Ted Eliopoulos, who held the role for about a year. John Streur, Calvert's chair and the CEO from 2015 through late last year, will leave the firm in March.
And Joanna Rotenberg, the president of Fidelity's personal investing group, will also leave the firm at year-end. The Boston-based firm is reorganizing its retail investor group into two units: wealth and brokerage. Roger Stiles, the firm's head of technology and global services, will lead the new wealth business. The brokerage group will be run by Tom Jessop, who was previously head of Fidelity Digital Assets. Rotenberg took the role atop Fidelity's personal investing group two years ago, succeeding Kathleen Murphy.
About 60% of mutual funds and ETFs had fee waivers or other expense reductions in place in 2022, according to a recent Ignites analysis of filings from 10,000 products. Advisors at about half of the funds with such rebates – about 3,000 – are allowed to recover such fees and expenses. Yet, fewer than 500 funds actually did so. And when they did, the amount clawed back was just a sliver of the amount that they waived. Guggenheim, for example, forgoed $22 million in fees last year from its $21.7 billion Total Return Bond Fund – and recovered about $50,000.
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