Team size: 75 

Major Advisers: Slaughter and May, Pinsent Masons, Burness Paull, Addleshaw Goddard, Dechert 

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in? 

We have been very active in M&A on both the buy and sell sides. We agreed to sell abrdn Capital — our discretionary fund management business — to LGT for up to £140m, and we have monetised our remaining stakes in HDFC Life and HDFC Asset Management, our Indian strategic investments, for an aggregate value of over £1bn.  

At the same time, we have acquired five US closed-end funds from Macquarie and recently agreed on a deal to buy Tekla Capital Management, a Boston-based firm specialising in £2.6bn of healthcare and biotech investments. Abrdn also acquired the largest external stake in Archax, the UK’s leading digital securities exchange.  

Since buying interactive investors for about £1.5 bn last year, we are now integrating our financial planning offering into ii to create a market-leading, tech-enabled player in the UK D2C investment market. 

What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months? 

Having welcomed our public affairs team into the function, we are maximising opportunities to collaborate across the legal, governance and public affairs disciplines to amplify abrdn’s voice in the regulatory, governance and policy-making arenas.  

The LSPA function is already a key player in abrdn’s drive to leverage growth opportunities across its client segments — global institutions, UK IFAs and UK personal investors — while refocusing its public and private investment capabilities given secular industry trends. Asset tokenisation is an exciting prospect which explains our investment in Archax and the recent tokenisation of their holding in abrdn’s Sterling Liquidity Fund.  

Although growth opportunities are available, the overall investment environment remains challenging given high rates and inflation, lower growth and geo-political tensions, and this demands disciplined execution, so the business is best positioned for a turn in the cycle.  

Finally, one cannot mention generative AI as both an opportunity and a risk.   

As a general counsel, how do you anticipate and prepare for potential legal and regulatory challenges that may arise, particularly in light of emerging technologies and evolving business landscapes? 

There is a lot of policy-making in the UK pensions and capital markets space in which we are keenly interested. Regulators across the globe, including in some of our major operating jurisdictions, remain focused on operational resilience, including cyber-security.  

Generative AI will feature heavily in the legal and regulatory context as we move forward with various use cases across our business, including our functional capabilities. Our scrum team is working with multiple parts of our business, advising on commercial and operational considerations, biases and ethical issues, data quality, existing and upcoming regulations, and contractual and outsourcing matters.