(Bloomberg) — Wellington Management Co. is a rarity in the investment world: a fund manager with more than $1 trillion of assets and almost zero brand recognition.
Not for long.
The staid, nearly century-old firm that mostly serves vanilla equity and bond strategies to buttoned-up institutions like pensions and endowments is now moving aggressively into private markets and hedge funds. Wellington is spending big to hire from bulge-bracket banks and alternative investment firms, adding dozens of private markets professionals to build a unit of about 40 people.
It’s also hustling to build a brand with retail investors, many of whom have never heard of the $1.3 trillion firm. It’s a big change for a money manager that for decades didn’t care about what the world thought, as long as its big institutional clients were happy.
Among its recent hires, Wellington recruited a head of private investments capital formation from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., poached a team from Pacific Investment Management Co. to expand in private credit and hired Christina Kopec Rooney from Goldman’s asset management arm to head its nascent push into the US wealth market. It even partnered with private equity giant Blackstone Inc. and Vanguard Group to launch hybrid funds for retail investors.
In perhaps its most radical shift, Wellington – housed across 19 floors in Boston’s Atlantic Wharf – has done the previously unthinkable: It hired a public relations team.
“It’s unfamiliar,” said Steve Klar, Wellington’s president.
It’s a sign of the times. Tectonic shifts in asset management are pushing the firm, and others like it, out of their comfort zone. Traditional asset managers under pressure from outflows and fee compression in their mutual funds are striving to break into the more lucrative private markets to boost their margins and assets before their competitors gain all the spoils.
Rivals such as Franklin Resources Inc. and T. Rowe Price Group Inc., and even the likes of industry giants BlackRock Inc. and State Street Corp., are diving in headfirst, buying alternative investment firms or partnering with private equity shops to launch funds. On Thursday, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said it will purchase as much as $1 billion of T. Rowe Price shares as the two team up to sell private-market products.
Wellington’s Chief Executive Officer Jean Hynes said in an interview at the firm’s headquarters that despite relying mostly on stickier institutional money, she knows the firm isn’t immune to the intense pressures reshaping the asset management industry. Client migration to cheap passive funds has pushed the industry’s average fee down to just 0.3% from about 1% two decades ago, according to Morningstar Inc. (Vanguard — Wellington’s largest client, accounting for about a third of the firm’s assets — charges an average fee of 0.07%.)
Wellington argues it’s especially well positioned among its peers to go big on private markets. The firm’s executives say its private partnership structure – with no shareholders to answer to – gives the firm control, allowing it to play the long game and retain its tight-knit culture.
Michael Carmen, a partner at Wellington who’s behind the expansion, says that an ambitious 10-year plan kicked off in 2023 to grow the private markets unit that now manages only $9.7 billion. He’s even interviewing candidates to start a secondaries business to acquire illiquid positions from other investors, one of the hottest areas in alternative investing.
Its new emphasis on higher-fee alternatives is already shifting internal power dynamics at a time when different teams inside the firm are fighting for resources. Some who work in the more traditional, lower-fee parts of the business say that as private markets become more prominent at the firm, the rewards are going disproportionately to employees who work in that business, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Klar, one of three people who determines partner compensation, said this is not the case. If the privates business does well, then all the partners at Wellington benefit, he said.
Closely Guarded
While most of Wellington’s assets are in privately held accounts, for which information isn’t available, data for its public funds offer a glimpse into the industry’s struggles. About 160 funds with combined assets of a half-trillion dollars managed or sub-advised by the firm recorded outflows of more than $130 billion between 2022 and the end of June 2025, according to Morningstar.
Wellington’s growing hedge fund franchise, set up in the mid-1990s, now manages about $20 billion in long-short strategies. While that’s a tiny slice of the firm’s overall assets, it accounts for an outsize share of the firm’s profits.
To attract and retain the talent needed to generate the above-market returns many alternative investment clients expect, the firm has also had to utilize other routes to a big payday besides its classic and lengthy path to becoming a partner.
Alternative investment portfolio staffers are compensated in line with market standards, Klar said. For those deemed to have a big impact on the firm’s financial performance, there’s always the position of managing director — a role that allows staff to share in some of the profits without having been named partner.
Wellington’s push into wealth is also forcing the firm to rethink another closely guarded aspect of its culture: its secrecy. For decades, the asset manager was so content with having a name known only among pensions and endowments that it made a point of not having a public profile.
But Wellington often took its privacy to extremes. A former employee recalls that it was so hard to find information about the firm when he joined 20 years ago that he wasn’t sure it was a legitimate company until he had his first interview.
People at bank wealth channels — which play a vital role in selling Wellington’s products to individuals — have said that everyday investors don’t know the firm and, for the funds to sell, the brand needs to be bigger.
And so, Wellington has reluctantly begun hiring its first public relations people in recent years. It’s learning, slowly but surely, how to put itself out there.
Next Century
This isn’t the first time Wellington has had to reinvent itself.
The firm, founded in 1928, faced an existential crisis 50 years ago after a disastrous run in equities nearly left it for dead. Its roughly two dozen partners at the time mortgaged their houses and used the money to delist the firm from the stock market.
It later fired Jack Bogle, in 1974, after disagreements with Wellington partners over investment strategy and personnel matters. Bogle went on to found Vanguard, and Wellington agreed to run active strategies for his new outfit. Vanguard eventually became a household name synonymous with the 401(k) market, while Wellington built its brand with institutional clients and shunned the spotlight.
In the ensuing years Wellington became less Boston-centric, opened offices and launched funds in Europe and Asia and abandoned a fixation on US equities to start investing in international stocks and, more recently, in bonds. (Today, about 40% of its assets are in fixed income.)
As it looks to its next century, the firm is stretching further beyond the status quo. As part of its partnership with Blackstone and Vanguard, Wellington now oversees around 100 people globally working on the project. Terry Burgess, one of the firm’s top three decision makers, is in charge of the effort.
Klar said that beyond courting retail investors, the firm’s alts expansion — and attracting talent for that business — is another reason Wellington wants its name out there. As it peddles its brand, Wellington now records podcasts, produces videos with weekly market updates, and churns out regular press releases.
It’s a far cry for a firm that, until recently, never even had a publicist on the payroll.
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