Meridian Capital — Annual Report · 2025 13 / 15
People & Culture
A craft, practised patiently
Asset management has no factories and no patents; its only durable asset is judgement. Meridian Capital is organised to develop it and to keep it. Our 640 people include 60 investment analysts, and average tenure across the firm stands at 8.2 years — in an industry where portfolio managers change employers as readily as benchmarks. Employee engagement reached 81 out of 100 in the 2025 survey, the highest reading in its history.
The deepest alignment mechanism is also the simplest: our people invest alongside our clients. Forty percent of all variable compensation is deferred over three years into the firm’s own funds, at the same prices and terms as any client. When a fund disappoints, the people who manage it feel it in their own savings — a discipline no policy manual can replicate.
The people behind the portfolios
Twelve seats at the research desks
Each September, twelve graduates join our trainee programme and spend two years rotating through the research desks — equities, fixed income, multi-asset and sustainability — before taking a permanent seat. They learn the way the firm has taught since 1998: sitting next to a senior analyst, defending their first models at the Monday investment meeting, and being wrong in front of colleagues who remember being wrong themselves. Most of today’s desk heads started in this programme.
How we work
“We do not hire finished portfolio managers; we grow them. An average tenure of 8.2 years is not a loyalty statistic — it is the length of a full market cycle, lived through together.”