Blair Pickerell joins "the next Jardine Fleming", Nikko AM

Nikko Asset Management has hired Blair Pickerell in Hong Kong as head of Asia and global chief marketing officer. The move is a bid by Nikko’s top management, including CEO Tim McCarthy, to forge the region’s leading independent asset-management firm. Usually this sort of thing is PR guff, but Pickerell and McCarthy have the experience to back up their ambition for Nikko AM to become the successor to the old Jardine Fleming Asset Management, which really was for a time the region’s le…