Andrea Rossi arrives at the Italian restaurant Lucio bearing a gift but it really should be me that has brought a present for the boss of M&G.

After all, it’s Rossi’s 59th birthday, but “after a certain age, you don’t celebrate”, he jokes. I’ve met the Italian-Swedish chief executive of the FTSE 100 asset manager for lunch at his favourite London restaurant.

He apologises for being slightly late, having been caught in the chaos caused by the Tube strike in the capital on the day we meet, and makes up for it by giving me a bottle of olive oil produced at his family’s home in Italy. There’s no need to open it at Lucio, though, which provides its own olive oil for bread dipping and drizzling.

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“No franchises, one restaurant run by the family — that’s how it should be,” says Rossi, who lives not far away in Chelsea and will have family and friends over in the evening for his birthday. “They do simple ingredients, but that’s what food is about.”

It’s a bit like his approach to turning around M&G, he says.

A venerable name in British asset management that created the first unit trust in 1931 and now oversees assets of about £355 billion, the group was acquired by Prudential in 1999 for £1.9 billion as part of a push by the insurance giant to bolster its investment range.

Twenty years later M&G was revived as an independent company again, when in 2019 the Pru demerged its UK and European operations into a separately listed company on to the London stock market.

M&G shares made their debut at 220p, in a listing that valued the business at £5.7 billion, but the stock soon slumped, knocked by the turmoil caused by the Covid pandemic as well as broader questions about the company’s structure. Spanning a life insurance and pensions division, an asset manager and a wealth business, some investors and analysts have viewed the business, which employs about 8,400 people, as unwieldy and a prime candidate for a takeover and break-up.

When Rossi joined in October 2022 and succeeded John Foley, the chief executive who had led the business through its Pru demerger, M&G shares were languishing at about 167p. They now stand near 250p, propelled higher by a turnaround of the business by Rossi, who earned almost £2.6 million for his efforts last year.

“I came up with a very clear, simple strategy. Three ingredients: financial strength, simplification and growth,” he says. “You can have great ingredients, but if you don’t know how to mix them, your plate will not be good.”

It has involved a cost-cutting programme to find £230 million of savings by the end of this year, including a voluntary redundancy scheme during which 226 people left, as well as a push to expand M&G’s overseas customer base, with 58 per cent of its external assets now coming from international clients, up from 37 per cent in 2019.

This diversification is set to continue after M&G announced a tie-up with Japan’s Dai-ichi Life in May, a deal that should raise the British group’s profile in Asia and is expected to generate at least $6 billion of new business flows into its funds over five years. It involves the Tokyo-based insurer acquiring a 15 per cent stake in the London-listed company.

Rossi has also built its footprint in the fast-growing private markets, with M&G buying a majority stake in P Capital Partners earlier this year in a move that has boosted its assets in this area to about £77 billion.

Yet despite the turnaround, speculation that M&G is a bid target has not gone away, with Australia’s Macquarie rumoured to have been a possible suitor two years ago and, more recently, the American investment giant Apollo.

Rossi won’t be drawn on the speculation, insisting that “we have a strong independent future in front of us”, and dismisses suggestions that M&G should be broken up.

“Why would I separate something which is giving me a competitive advantage over others?” he asks over the hum of the restaurant, which has filled up for lunch as we wait for our food to arrive: buffalo mozzarella to start for Rossi, followed by chargrilled chicken paillard with spinach, while I have ordered tuna carpaccio and roast fillet of hake. It’s a working day and Rossi has a board meeting after our meal, so we stick with mineral water.

Running a company had long been Rossi’s ambition. Born to a Swedish mother and an Italian father, as a child he “liked to lead” and was always the captain in team sports, although he was “never the best at sport”, he concedes.

Thanks to his father’s job as a senior executive at Fiat, the family moved frequently when Rossi was young, and by the age of 15 he was in London, where he was a pupil at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington.

He then went to Sapienza University of Rome, where he studied economics and commerce, after which he joined Olivetti, the Italian manufacturer of computers, calculators and fax machines, before embarking on an MBA at INSEAD (European Institute of Business Administration) in Fontainebleau in France. He took a job subsequently at General Electric, where he worked at its lighting business in Enfield in north London and then moved to GE Capital, its financial services arm.

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However, most of his career has been spent rising through the ranks at Axa, the French insurance and investment group, which took him to Paris, Milan, Dubai and finally back to London, where he was the chief executive of its fund management business. He then struck off on his own to start a private assets investment firm, which he launched in January 2020 only for the pandemic to upend his plans.

A believer that “if you win, good, if you fail, fail quickly”, he moved on, becoming a senior adviser at Boston Consulting Group and taking other non-executive roles, before being headhunted for the M&G job.

A self-described “true European” who speaks Italian, Swedish, English and French fluently, as well as being able to get by in German and Spanish, Rossi believes that recent worries in the Square Mile and in Westminster that London’s status as a global financial centre is fading are overdone: “We’ve been too negative all the time.

“We have the best universities in the world in this country. Everybody wants to come here. The talent you can attract here, you can attract nowhere else.”

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Still, he notes that the government’s abolition of the non-dom tax regime, which includes an inheritance tax crackdown and which has been blamed for spurring some wealthy individuals to leave the UK, meant that the country “might have lost some people”, although he says he has no plans to go anywhere, even though he is affected by the changes.

He also rejects suggestions that active fund managers like M&G, which pick and choose investments, are being slowly killed off by cheaper, index-tracking passive rivals, arguing that this more volatile world of higher interest rates is “a golden age for active asset management”.

It’s certainly a boom time for investing in Europe, with M&G, like other fund management groups, detecting a shift among their clients to diversify investments away from the US following the upheaval caused by President Trump’s sweeping tariffs in April.

Rossi says the pivot actually started last year, before Trump rattled markets with his trade policies, when the valuation gap between highly rated American assets and European assets left the latter looking “extremely attractive”.

Our meal is over and Rossi, who declines dessert and a coffee, “I only drink coffee in the morning, I’m already very energised”, has his board meeting to attend. He insists on ordering an espresso for me before he has to dash off and wants to leave on an optimistic note.

“People are pushing down too much on this country,” he says. “We should be prouder about what we have and what we do.

“It’s like seeing the glass half full or half empty. We should always say it’s half full, and it can become fuller.”

CV

Age: 59
Family: Married with a 12-year-old son
Education: Masters in economics and commerce from Sapienza University of Rome, an MBA from INSEAD
Career: 1993: Olivetti; 1995-1999: General Electric, first in lighting then in GE Capital; 1999-2001: Transamerica Aegon; 2001-2019: Axa, various roles including running insurance in the Gulf and Middle East, leading its Italian business and finally chief executive of AXA Investment Managers; 2020: co-founded APM Investment Partners; 2020-2022: senior adviser at Boston Consulting Group; 2022-present: chief executive of M&G

Lucio, Fulham Road, SW3 6HY

Two courses for £34.50 x 2
Espresso £3.80
Mineral water £6
Service charge 12.5 per cent
Total £88.31