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“The reality is that we wouldn’t hire somebody who was not prepared to dedicate themselves to earning the CFA [designation],” says Botherway, executive chairman of Brook Asset Management Limited, New Zealand’s largest boutique investment management company. “[With] any new recruits that we bring on board we always stipulate that we expect them to undertake the CFA Program no matter what their existing qualifications are.”
Based in Auckland, Brook manages in excess of NZ$1 billion (US$678 million) of Australasian equities on behalf of wholesale clients. Brook has been mandated by the New Zealand Superannuation Fund to actively manage a portion of the fund’s allocation to Australasian equities. Botherway admits that although the firm’s size may seem “paltry” by global standards, the firm is loaded with CFA charterholders. “We have the largest number of CFA-qualified professionals on our staff of any firm in New Zealand.”
Granted, the firm is small. It’s an institutional wholesale fund manager purposefully held to a tight concentration of analysts and portfolio managers (there are only nine employees in the entire firm) so that the organization can focus exclusively on its core function: managing portfolios and beating benchmarks. All other operations necessary to run the firm, (e.g. accounting, fund administration and information technology,) are outsourced so Botherway and his colleagues can operate at peak efficiency, without the distractions of extra personnel and extra management concerns.
But the firm’s trimmed-down infrastructure and core efficiency are not the only selling points that Brook boasts. That’s where Botherway’s insistence on the CFA Program comes into play. The number of CFA charterholders in his firm “is an important marketing point when we’re pitching to a new client,” he says. “In terms of the global qualification I think it (the CFA designation) is one that clients can rely on regardless of where they are. So if you’ve got a client based in Australia who may not be entirely aware of a New Zealand-based qualification, they can look at the CFA designation and say, ‘OK, well, I know that’s a global qualification with a global standard.’” And this recognition helps Brook efficiently demonstrate to their clients the high skill level of its staff.
When looking to fill an open position, Brook requires job candidates to undergo a battery of tests to determine the caliber of their skills. The test puts forth investment scenarios with a raft of accompanying data and asks the job applicant to devise solutions and explain the rationale behind those plans. “It’s not so much whether the answer is right or wrong; it’s how they interpret the data and how they express it.”
Job applicants must demonstrate not only the analysis and logical skills the firm needs in terms of identifying the data and interpreting it, but also the skill to communicate in a way that’s easy to understand—partly for interacting with clients, but mostly for working with other people on the team.
“The analysts are there to argue the relative merits of a stock within a sector,” Botherway says. “So you want somebody who can actually write about it, who can convey the really important points and in a manner which is easily understood by other professionals.”
Botherway himself arrived at the CFA Program after working in treasury markets for a number of years. “I really wanted to improve my skill base and to have a qualification that was considered the premium qualification in the industry,” he says. “So, even though I considered it to be probably the course work with the greatest amount of work required, I also felt that it was going to be the best course for me for the long term. I considered an MBA or a master of finance type of degree, but I felt that the global nature of the CFA qualification and its focus on financial markets broadly was more appropriate for where I wanted to go.”
The breadth and depth that Botherway found in the CFA Program is why Brook reimburses employees’ CFA Program expenses. Brook pays for textbooks, gives two weeks of study leave before each exam, and reimburses all program costs for the first attempt at each level. Once the employee earns the CFA charter, Brook rewards the employee with an increase in pay.
With the firm positioned to expand its class offerings in the next few years, Botherway says that Brook wants to grow with sector specialists in private equity or high-yields and will recruit the right individuals at the right time. “We would certainly be looking for CFA-qualified individuals in those roles as well.”
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on’t even bother applying to Brook Asset Management if you aren’t willing to register for the CFA Program. 
