There is a certain irony in the fact that Xavier Meyer, the chief executive of Aberdeen Investments, moved to London at least partially to escape the gravitational pull of Asia.
After more than a decade building businesses across Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul and various other cities east of Suez — first with BNP Paribas and then as chief executive of Eastspring Investments, the asset management arm of Prudential plc — he and his family had decided that it was time to come home to Europe.
“When I told my kids we were going back to Europe after 15 years in Asia,” he recalls, “the first reaction was, ‘Please don’t tell me we’re going back to France.’ They were actually delighted when they heard it was London.”
The city, he says, is one of the easier places in the world to relocate to. It has, in any case, proved a rather eventful posting.
Meyer, who turned 50 earlier this year, joined the Edinburgh-based asset manager Aberdeen, then still known as Abrdn, in the summer of 2022 as chief client officer.
In November 2024 he was promoted to chief executive of the investments arm, inheriting the task of turning around a business that had seen net outflows of more than £9 billion in 2024 and was facing questions about its purpose in a rapidly consolidating industry.
The view from the middle
The consolidation theme, Meyer suggests, is the defining challenge for any asset manager that is not a BlackRock or Vanguard. “There has been a continuous concentration, with a number of players choosing to go for a scale strategy,” he says. “For all those not in that position, it puts the question of relevance at the centre.”
Aberdeen Investments, which manages around £390 billion in assets and is the investment arm of Aberdeen Group — whose total assets under management and administration reached £556 billion in 2025 — sits firmly in what Meyer calls the “large mid-size” bracket. He is direct about the dangers of that position: “The in-between is probably a dangerous place to be.”
The answer, as he sees it, is not to try to become a scale player but to be ruthlessly disciplined about what you do and for whom.
“We endorsed our specialist position,” he explains. “It’s not about covering each and every asset class, but concentrating on where we have a right to win and where we provide the right quality of added value for our clients.”
In practical terms, that means three core verticals: fixed income (the largest by assets under management, spanning public and private markets from developed to emerging), specialist equity — which includes emerging market equities, small and mid-caps, and thematic strategies such as listed infrastructure and healthcare — and real assets, principally European real estate and infrastructure. Two horizontal layers — multi-asset solutions and quantitative strategies — cut across these verticals.
What Aberdeen deliberately does not offer is equally revealing. “If you want a US large-cap growth fund, we don’t have that on the shelf, nor do we have any intention to grow that organically or inorganically.”
The outflows question
Financial results published earlier this year showed net outflows in the investments division widening to £3.9 billion in 2025, up from £1.1 billion in 2024 — a figure that prompted inevitable questions about whether the turnaround is really taking hold.
Meyer pushes back firmly on the framing. “We are managing £390 billion. An outflow of that nature is still sub-1% of managed assets,” he points out. “It doesn’t mean it should not be a source of attention, but you need to unpack the root cause.”
The unpacking, he argues, tells a more encouraging story. A significant portion of those outflows stem from Aberdeen’s strategic partnership with Standard Life (formerly Phoenix Group), which manages a large closed book of insurance business that is structurally in redemption. That drag, he says, is a known and structural feature of the relationship, not a signal of investment failure.
Strip that out, and 2025 looks considerably healthier. The institutional and retail wealth channel returned to net positive flows. Gross inflows into that core business rose 55% year-on-year. And perhaps most significantly, investment performance, usually a good indicator of future flows, improved substantially.
By the end of 2025, 84% of Aberdeen’s strategies were outperforming their benchmarks on a one-year basis and 80% on a three-year basis, well above the firm’s internal target of 70%. “Core sales are actually the best they’ve been for quite a long time,” Meyer says. “And investment performance has been improving materially.”
Navigating the new disorder
The military conflict that erupted in the Middle East in the spring has added a new layer of complexity to an already turbulent investment environment.
“It’s very hard to predict where things are going to go even tomorrow,” he says. The firm’s response has been to build a framework of scenario planning, shifting probability weightings between outcomes as events unfold.
“Our initial view was that it would be relatively intense but contained within a month,” he says. “We are now reducing the probability of that and moving towards a scenario with a bit more propagation — still ending in months, not years.”
The macroeconomic consequences of that shift are already baked into Aberdeen’s projections. Global growth for 2026 is now expected at around 3%, with inflation trending towards 4.7% globally.
The pattern, Meyer observes, is consistent with supply-shock dynamics rather than demand shocks: a world in which the old recipe of simple asset class diversification becomes unreliable.
“In supply-shock environments, the correlation between asset classes does not necessarily work the way you expect,” he says. “You have probably more correlation than before.”
That, he argues, is precisely where active management earns its keep: “It challenges the old recipe and provides value versus a static portfolio or static allocation.”
One strategic conclusion he draws from the new environment is the growing importance of infrastructure, both as an inflation hedge and as a strategic asset in a world of elevated geopolitical risk.
“It’s becoming strategic in a way it wasn’t before,” he says. “Not only is it interesting from an inflation perspective, but it’s also a component that countries and portfolios need for strategic reasons.”
Aberdeen’s infrastructure capabilities — which include concession-based global infrastructure and European economic infrastructure, as well as owning roughly 10% of the UK’s train rolling stock and delivering the Silvertown tunnel under the Thames in London on time during the pandemic — make this more than a theoretical conviction.
The emerging markets moment
If there is one area where Meyer allows himself something close to optimism, it is emerging markets. Aberdeen has long been associated with the asset class — the firm traces its DNA in part to the old Aberdeen Asset Management’s renowned emerging markets franchise — and currently manages over £60 billion in emerging market equities and debt.
Flows into the asset class were lukewarm for several years before something shifted around the second quarter of last year. “Since Liberation Day and its economic effects we started to see a drop in the dollar and a renewed increase in emerging market interest,” he says.
Multiple tailwinds converged: cheap valuations relative to historical averages; the demonstration effect of China’s AI innovation at a fraction of the capital cost of US technology companies; and a broader investor reassessment of US exceptionalism.
Meyer is careful to distinguish between interest and actual flows — “interest comes before flows, as it should” — but he is clear that both are now moving in the right direction.
“The valuation story still has a lot of legs to grow,” he says. China’s electrification programme, in particular, catches his attention: since 2022, the country has reportedly added close to as much electric power capacity as the entire US grid, and is on the verge of becoming a net exporter of electricity. “The development there has been truly phenomenal,” he says.
Private markets and the maturity test
The private credit wobbles of recent months get a measured response. “You need to differentiate between private credit and private credit,” Meyer says, noting that the asset class covers a wide spectrum from high-octane riskier lending to investment-grade-equivalent structures.
Aberdeen operates firmly at the safer, investment-grade end, partly because of its strong insurance client base. “The recent concerns and corrections have not been affecting us because it’s just not the same nature of assets we are managing,” he says.
More broadly, he views the current turbulence as healthy rather than alarming: “a maturity test for the asset class rather than anything else.”
The fundamental economic need for private credit as a source of business finance remains intact; what is being stress-tested is whether the underwriting discipline has kept pace with the growth. “The sooner the maturity test comes, the better,” he says.
The firm sold its private equity book in 2024 and 2025, concluding that it lacked the in-house capability to differentiate meaningfully in that space. The capital and focus have been redirected towards areas where Aberdeen does have genuine expertise, a decision Meyer defends without apology as consistent with the specialist strategy.
The investment trust footnote
Near the end of the conversation, Meyer raises a point he has been making at industry events that he considers underappreciated. The debate about how to democratise private market access for retail investors, he notes, has largely missed the fact that Britain invented the solution 150 years ago.
“There’s a certain irony that when we speak about how to democratise private markets, in the UK we probably solved that equation 150 years ago through investment trusts,” he says.
The permanent capital structure, the ability to trade daily, the regulatory framework for retail investors: investment trusts, he argues, are a remarkably modern answer to a problem the industry is spending fortunes trying to solve with new regulatory structures.
Aberdeen is the fifth largest investment trust manager globally, and its largest single vehicle — Tritax Big Box, of which Aberdeen now owns 80% — recently joined the FTSE 100.
It is not, Meyer is at pains to point out, a peripheral business. “I think it’s a very, very relevant form of investment.”
“You live and die by the quality of the services you provide to your clients. I want to believe that creates, and should create, a different mindset.”
