Doing the maths in world of business

Craig Ansley, who has been an actuary, an academic, a managing director and chairman, takes time out from his career on board his yacht Crocus. Picture / Paul Estcourt

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.
* Author W. S. Anglin

No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.
* Leonardo da Vinci

You know we all became mathematicians for the same reason: we were lazy.
* Academic Max Rosenlicht

Of these quotes - borrowed, we admit, from an excellent collection on the website of an American university, Furman - it is that last that sounds the most like Craig Ansley, 58, as he looks back on a career built on numbers.

No high-falutin claims of a higher calling in that one.

Ansley is the chairman in New Zealand of Russell Investment Group - the trading name for the United States company Frank Russell, which advises clients in this country with $14 billion in funds.

In New Zealand, Russell's biggest long-term clients are:

* The Earthquake Commission, with $4.5 billion of investments.

* The Government Superannuation Fund (the civil servants' pension fund, not the New Zealand Superannuation Fund), $3.4 billion.

* The National Provident Fund, $2.1 billion.

* Community trusts, including the ASB Trusts. $1.6 billion.

He is also the head of consulting practice for the firm in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

Ansley counts the success of the office, which he launched in 1992, as one of his career highlights.

He nominates a second: securing a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught alongside Nobel laureates such as Merton Miller, Myron Scholes and George Stigler. (That is Scholes as in "Black-Scholes", the formula for valuing share options.)

His is a nicely mathematical assessment: "It's hard to get a job there and I worked out once that, of the people they hire, only one in 20 makes it to be a professor."

Mathematics appealed to Ansley at Shirley Boys' High School in Christchurch because "you didn't have to do any work".

"All you had was a puzzle - you didn't have to remember anything, that's how I looked at it."

His thesis for a masters degree in mathematics was entitled "Hilbert Space Methods and the Theory of Time Series", a reference to the work of David Hilbert, the German mathematician who famously laid out 23 problems at a conference in Paris in 1900 for the world's mathematicians to tackle in the 20th century.

After university, Ansley became an actuary. The attraction: the pay.

The cut-down version of his career is: actuary, academic specialising in statistics and econometrics, managing director and then chairman.

In an official blurb on the history of Russell in New Zealand, Ansley recalled the venture's 1992 launch.

He had been working as a professor in the accounting and finance department of Auckland University when he was drawn in by a former academic colleague who was the managing director of Frank Russell in Australia.

"It was me, a secretary and a $200 typewriter in a seedy office in the Stock Exchange Building."

That was in the days when crowds watched "chalkies" - women wielding sticks of chalk - write out the latest prices on the stock exchange boards.

Today, the firm has 13 staff - they wield a formidable collection of first-class honours degrees - and another former academic, Ed Schuck, is the managing director.

It is number one in its field, with Mercer Investment Consulting number two.

The essence of the business is advising clients such as pension funds on where to put their money by working out how much risk they can take and then advising on the mix of investments - and who should manage them.

The firm is powerfully placed in the food chain of the financial services industry.

It rarely happens - Ansley can think of three or four examples over 10 years - but, yes, Russell has told clients to fire managers.

Russell has an impact on the amount of money that investors put into the local sharemarket versus sharemarkets overseas - a sometimes contentious topic.

Ansley says that, of the $14 billion invested by clients on retainers, 50 per cent or more is in equities. Of that, maybe a quarter is in the New Zealand market.

One can imagine community trusts quizzing him on missing out on capturing larger shares of the spectacular returns of the past two years from the local sharemarket.

The answer will be the usual one: think wider, think longer.

"If you think you can pick which market is going to have a good year and which is going to have a bad year, you're wasting your time."

In Ansley's view, a big opportunity since 2000 has been new ways for clients to diversify with investment products in five areas: property, hedge funds, commodities, infrastructure and private equity.

If Ansley looks familiar, it could be the resemblance to his brother, Greg, the man with the handle-bar moustache who is the New Zealand Herald's Australian correspondent.

His ties with the world of journalism do not stop there.

His brother, Bruce, is a journalist with the NZ Listener and former wife Mary Holm writes a money column for the Business Herald.

Outside of office hours, Ansley can be seen on the boat that he started building in Chicago and finished in Auckland - a 1936 William Atkin-designed double-ended cruiser - or ballroom dancing with his wife.

Resume

Age: 58
Educated: Shirley Boys' High School, Christchurch. 
B.Sc, Mathematics - University of Canterbury.
1969: M.Sc, Mathematics - Victoria, Wellington.
1972: Fellow of Institute of Actuaries, London.
1975: Associate of Society of Actuaries, United States.
1976: Ph.D, Business Administration, University of Michigan.
1985: Professor, University of Chicago.
1986: Professor, Australian Graduate School of Management.
1988: Professor, University of Auckland.
1992: Managing director, Frank Russell, New Zealand.