Could you provide a brief journey of how you arrived where you are today?
One of the first things I did was to work in the US Peace Corps in South Korea. That two-year voluntary program gave me an appreciation for the Asian culture. From that assignment, I went to Japan, at a time when it was going through many changes, and I was presented with many opportunities to continue to work there. When the Japanese government allowed foreign banking institutions to set up their securities institutions, I was hired to assist mainly British companies create their branches and develop their facilities. I ended up being with HSBC for 17 and a half years, performing a number of different roles including administrative, Japanese equity research, sales, setting up futures and bond trading and eventually going into the capital market area. The final stage was in mergers and acquisitions. All this gave me a broad background. In January 2003, I was approached to join FTSE and I saw that as a great opportunity.
What does your role involve?
Going into countries with no contacts whatsoever and building relationships with the fund management industry, regulators and the stock exchange to allow FTSE to create indices or to buy certain products, create partnerships with the stock exchanges and thereby grow the company business in the Asia-Pacific. Therefore, I have many different hats that I might wear on any day because working with regulators is different from going to fund managers and selling them something. The past 5½ years have been a very active period for me. We started with four people in the Hong Kong office; and now we have offices in Tokyo and Sydney as well. We have stock exchange relationships with Taiwan and other Asian markets, and we are looking to more stock exchange relationships going forward.
What is your greatest achievement to date?
I think this is an ongoing thing because my greatest achievement so far has been in developing an approach to partnerships and working with a wide variety of partners both in countries and across the region to grow our business. Collaborating requires special skills and it is not just a win-win approach; we also have to have a high level of self-disclosure. There is the trust element that comes into a partnership and requires a forward-looking approach.
Which of your products/services deliver the best results?
We are diversifying our offerings by growing our partnerships, getting partners to work together with other partners as well, producing new growth and creating new opportunities for clients. We have been increasing the number of clients, not just growing revenue with a variety of products. Some of them have conventional finance business and we have been advancing the returns by inputting additional methodology into the indexes.
What are the strengths of your business?
Partnership. It creates the opportunities, making your business more appealing to certain kinds of clients; it brings new products that you have not had.
What are the factors contributing to the success of your company?
The follow-on from the sub-prime crisis has sent markets into turmoil and as people begin to see how the crisis has affected each market, we will see how our business is affected in each of these markets. It appears to be a market-by-market situation. We have partnerships in some markets, some markets are developed markets and some are emerging markets where we have to spend more time on education. Therefore, it depends on the kind of markets and the stage of development. I think we have an offering virtually in any market. It is a matter of working with the people and helping them discover what we have and showing them how to use it.
What are the obstacles faced in running your business today?
We are a very conservatively run company with very good margins and very strong growth. What that means for me is that I do not have a budget to spend. We are very much driven by going into a new market, establishing a revenue stream, then putting more resources on top of it. That is a bit of an obstacle. You would want to spend a little more money up front and hope the returns would come. We also have competitors for various kinds of products but not all of them have the same product mix that we have. In developing relationships with exchanges, we help them appreciate the additional value that we bring to them and that is one of the key features.
Where do you see the Islamic finance industry in, say, the next five years?
There could be a little bit of consolidation of all kinds of products that are going to be viable. We have to remember that the Shariah is quite strict, but this does reduce the number of things that you can do. We need to make sure that within those confines, Shariah finance per se has as many different kinds of things they can use as possible. We need to continually work with the conventional products and services and see how much of them we can make Shariah compliant. To see Shariah finance grow is to see that it continues to have diversity and a realistic approach to which asset class it can invest in.
Name one thing you would like to see change in the world of Islamic finance?
Well, it is not so much change that will continue to evolve because as the market evolves, it will become clearer as to its requirements. Right now, there are a number of us trying to assemble products that cater to the more sophisticated Islamic market. However, that is a very small market. I would like to see people become proactive in asking for customized indices that would help them better.