Lauren Bloom was recently named one of Benefits and Pensions Monitor's Elite Women
A lot of what Lauren Bloom does at T. Rowe Price Canada can be summarized in one word: collaboration. As vice president and head of Canada, distribution, at the global investment management firm, part of her role is fostering “meaningful relationships” with not only colleagues but clients and prospects.
“A lot of the time, we're listening and we're trying to understand what people's needs are, and then trying to act as an extension of their team to help them solve their problems, work together and deliver some actionable insights for them, so that's what I love,” Blooms says. “It's really the relationship building. And being client centric has always been key.”
Sometimes, the collaboration can mean addressing the challenges that come Bloom’s way as well. After all, Bloom, who was recently named as one of Benefits and Pensions Monitor’s Elite Women, says the landscape is continuously evolving. As an active asset manager, she has to deal with changing investor preferences, an increase to allocations and alternatives as well as continued competition from passive funds.
“[The markets] are always challenging and trying to figure out what's happening just within even broader asset management industry too. There's fee pressures, there's increasing costs. In my seat, it's predominantly active that we're speaking to, and the way you connect with clients has evolved since the pandemic,” she says.
Active management is fundamental to T. Rowe and it’s a philosophy that Bloom really believes in. “If you're gonna work at one of the active managed shops, you want to share that philosophy and share what that value add is that you believe you are delivering. We constantly have to have conversations in their specific asset classes,” she says.
As to the effect that active management has on DC plans, Bloom is quick to point out that as a DC plan participant, the individual is taking on the risk of allocating capital, which will ultimately determine how ready they are for the retirement in the long-term.
“The challenge is, you don't know what's going to happen to the markets in the long run,” Bloom highlights. “That's where I think you have to come back to your philosophy. Do you believe that the manager that you're allocating to has the capabilities to outperform the benchmark, or whatever the passive instrument is over a period of time? If you think they are able to, and you take into consideration the differential in pricing, that's how you have to make your decision.”
Bloom says her role is navigating the competitive landscape and with clients having an array of investment management companies to choose from, she’s constantly ensuring clients think of T. Rowe Price.
“It's continuing to reiterate to the team, maintain our core values,” Bloom highlighted. Let's work together as a team, let's discuss the challenges and opportunities that you're having with different contacts within the business. Let's make sure we're staying on top of key trends and share best practices with one another.”
In order to do that, Bloom added, there needs to be a team that trusts one another, is open to being transparent, and really wants to work as one team. “I think that that's what I've tried to harness within T. Rowe Canada is a team where we're all working together. We all have individual goals, but at the end of the day, everyone knows what we're working to as Team Canada, and celebrating those successes and learning from those challenges that we have along the way.”
Bloom points out that it's not just the decisions that she has to make as an asset manager but rather having enough time to make them. That means having to plan for their sales year a year in advance. “Our calendar is complete now up until January,” she said. “Obviously, there's flexibility. But when we sit down, that is a big process, because we're very fortunate at T. Rowe that we have a plethora of really strong strategies on our platform, but we have to think about how we want to articulate to our audiences.”
“It's that planning process. That is where we start off as a team, and I want everyone coming into the room energized about ideas and opportunities, so that collectively, we can pull together a calendar that we think will result in the best outcome for T. Rowe, our clients, and our prospects over the course of the year,” she added.
At the end of the day, Bloom says the T. Rowe global research platform and her team believes through their relationships with the companies they’re investing in, they’re able to provide additional alpha to clients so that in the long run, they're better prepared for their retirement. It all comes back to collaboration.
“It's all about collaboration across the platform, it's collaboration across sectors, it's collaboration across asset classes, and really getting an in-depth perspective of what's happening not only just with that company, that industry, the broader sector, within regions,” she says.
“In order to collaborate, there has to be really effective communication. I think we have a number of proof points throughout our 80-plus years in the industry, where we've been able to illustrate that to clients. That provides us with a value add that we can then deliver to clients in terms of making those tough decisions for them.”
