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Ajay Srinivasan leaves Prudential AM

The head of Prudential Asset Management for Asia Pacific resigns to take a break before moving onto new ventures.
Ajay Srinivasan, Asia Pacific CEO for fund management at Prudential Asset Management, has resigned, effective the end of this month. He says he will take a short break before pursuing one of a number of leads that may see him return to the regionÆs asset management universe.

Srinivasan is one of the regionÆs most experienced fund management chief executives. He is among a handful of players who can honestly claim to have built the business from scratch.

He joined Prudential ICICI Asset Management in India in 1998, a new joint venture that represented Prudential PlcÆs first fund-management presence in the region. The insurer and its India mutual funds JV represented a collective $30 million of assets under management in Asia Pacific.

In 2001 Srinivasan was picked to lead the Asia-Pacific funds business and moved to Hong Kong. At that point the life insurance business had grown to $1-2 billion but the firm had no retail funds business except its India JV.

Today Prudential Asset Management has a retail funds business in 10 regional markets, and in AUM terms has a top-five market share in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam. Its businesses in China, Japan and Korea are newer, as is its presence in the Middle East (also under Srinivasan). It manages $58 billion in Asia Pacific as of December. Srinivasan says the amount of assets sourced from the region is also about that size, of which half comes from retail.

He says he is most proud of putting in place effective teams for client service and the establishment of the product development team in Singapore, now led by Choy Peng-wah and Stuart Guinness.

The firm is transferring Alan Wren from London to serve as interim CEO. Wren has worked for Prudential Plc in the United Kingdom, left to work for a spell at Invesco, and has served for a number of years as an advisor to the firm. He is expected to arrive this week or next. The firm will also launch a formal search for a permanent successor.
¬ Haymarket Media Limited. All rights reserved.
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