Irish fund managers: come home

"We're finding the commute is slowly becoming something the Irish firms are beginning to accept," says Graeme Knox, managing director of headhunters The Knox Partnership. "A few years ago they would have wanted people to make the move to live and work there, but now the commute is increasingly common."

Part of the impetus for the change is thought to be the difficulty of finding local expertise to work on global investment mandates.

AIB Investment Managers, for example, is among those investing an increasingly high proportion of its funds outside the beleaguered Irish equities market, which has slipped 28.6% since May 2007. According to Rubicon Investment Consulting, AIB achieved some of the highest returns last year.

"Fund managers with experience in international companies have a skillset more applicable to the direction Irish fund managers are now taking," says one Irish recruiter working in the fund management sector.

As a result, Ireland's fund managers are being forced to scour the likes of Edinburgh and London for talent. Last year BIAM recruited Barry Glavin, deputy head of research, and Peter de Lacy, senior research analyst, from the UK; Hibernian Asset Management hired Anita Donohoe from Standard Life Investments in Edinburgh; Setanta Asset Management hired Kieran Dempsey as CIO from GE Asset Management in London.

Bernadette Godley, head of marketing at BIAM, says plenty of her colleagues are former Irish expats who've come home: "Now there's an expertise locally and the need for people from other shores isn't as great as it once was."

A fund manager with four to five years' experience in Ireland can expect to earn between €60k and €120k (depending on the firm and whether they switch jobs), and bonuses are typically 100% of salary.