Company: Aberdeen Investments
Personal AUM: £24bn
Company AUM: £390bn for Aberdeen plc overall
Career history
Daniel is head of fund selection for public markets within the Multi Asset and Alternative Investment Solutions team at Aberdeen.
He leads a team of analysts, conducting fund manager research on over 300 active and passive funds from both Aberdeen and the wider market.
Prior to taking on this leadership role at the start of last year, he was a portfolio manager on a number of funds including MyFolio Index and ESG Index ranges, as well as institutional, MPS and advisory portfolios. He is still the chair of the committee for the Strategic Asset Allocation of these funds.
Daniel has worked at Aberdeen since the year 2000, initially as a private client manager, advising individual investors on pensions and investments and moving into fund management as a fund researcher in 2013.
Key areas of focus
I try to bring my experience as an adviser to build solutions that keep the client in mind. Over the past year I have been working to better align the fund outcomes for our global institutional portfolios and retail clients, with a view to developing fund blends that deliver the right outcomes for advisers to use and are genuinely beneficial for end investors.
A lot of work has also been done around SDR and ESG, making sure that research aligns with the sustainable characteristics required in some of our mandates.
With a relatively new team, much of the focus has been on laying the groundwork for efficient, scalable research. The team has been broadening coverage, refining processes, and creating the structures needed to support thoughtful analysis and a wider range of ideas over time. We are building a research hub to enhance fund selection and hence decision‑making across the portfolio management teams.
By introducing AI and new analytical tools, we can make research easier to access, more relevant, and more directly supportive of blend construction for different portfolios. This is also intended to strengthen the support provided to portfolio managers through clearer, more consistent research outputs.
