Chief risk officer Tom Murphy has been appointed the inaugural president of Sun Life Asset Management.Sun Life/Sun Life
Sun Life Financial Inc. SLF-T is set to launch a new asset management division that will bring together most of the investment management companies the insurer has acquired over the past four decades.
Canada’s second-largest insurer announced Monday that chief risk officer Tom Murphy has been appointed the inaugural president of Sun Life Asset Management, a new business entity set to open Jan. 1. He will remain in his current role until a successor is named.
Over the past year, Sun Life chief executive officer Kevin Strain has told shareholders the company no longer views itself as “just an insurance company,” but as an asset manager as well. During an investor day in 2024, he pointed to the investment arm as a pivotal part of the company’s growth strategy.
The new division and executive appointment will bring all of Sun Life’s asset management businesses together under one roof in a bid to boost collaboration within the company, Mr. Strain said in a statement.
The companies to be moved into the new division include U.S. asset manager MFS Investment Management, alternative asset provider SLC Management, Sun Life’s stake in Indian-based Aditya Birla Sun Life Asset Management, teams that work for Sun Life’s Asia asset management group, its pension risk transfer business and the chief investment officer teams that oversee investments in Sun Life’s $200-billion balance sheet.
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Sun Life has about $1.4-trillion in assets under management, split between its businesses in Canada and Asia and its pension clients. Together the companies generated more than $1.4-billion in profit in 2024.
Each company will continue to operate under its existing brand with no impact to its governance structure, leadership team or investment philosophy. The asset managers will report earnings under the new Sun Life Asset Management division starting next year.
In an interview, Mr. Murphy said the decision to house all the companies under one roof is not about cost synergies, but about allowing asset managers to work more closely with the insurance operations.
“We are an insurance company that moved into asset management four decades ago, and those two businesses to some extent are a self-perpetuating wheel,” he said. “They can feed off each other, they can fuel each other’s growth, and if they work well together, they can bring creative ideas and products to our clients. That’s an evolution again of our business.”
For example, Sun Life has a wide variety of public and private asset classes, including equities, fixed income, real estate, infrastructure and private credit, that can be leveraged within the insurance businesses. Over the past decade, SLC has acquired well-known alternative asset names such as real estate investors Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak and private credit provider Crescent Capital.
Mr. Murphy said that can be done by working more closely with Sun Life’s own wealth channels, such as Sun Life Global Investments, which houses the company’s in-house financial advisers.
Along with an executive team he is in the process of hiring, Mr. Murphy will help form new strategic partnerships between the asset managers and look for new sources of permanent capital to drive revenue growth, build scale and provide access to seed capital.
He brings more than 25 years of global asset management experience to the new division. He joined SLC Management in 2018, where he was president of SLC Fixed Income before being appointed Sun Life’s chief risk officer in 2022.
Before SLC Management, he spent 20 years at Mercer, where he led the U.S. consulting firm’s investment management businesses in Europe and the North American retirement and benefit administration businesses.