Jauri Häkkä is determined to steer clear of the style trap that he believes fund selectors often fall into. In the Nordea fund of fund range for which he is responsible, Häkkä favours managers with a ‘go anywhere’ approach.

‘We feel that we can allow many of these boutique-type managers to run their portfolios exactly as they intended to do,’ he says. ‘So we select highly active managers and leave them to do their thing. We’re also a little bit agnostic about style. We try to avoid the trap that many asset allocators and fund selectors fall into of putting managers in distinct style boxes.

‘When you do that, you take away a huge part of the opportunity and miss out on the managers who are able to manoeuvre themselves… highly skilled managers who can definitely deliver alpha, but are difficult to put in a specific style.’

Citywire’s website recently triggered a heated debate over the freedom given to investment managers, when we reported the dismissal of star fund manager Alexander Kapfer in Germany after a dispute over whether or not he followed the house view.

It is pretty clear which side of that particular debate Häkkä would come down on. He highlights groups such as Carmignac and Neptune as examples of the type of very active, style-agnostic, high-conviction asset managers he is referring to.

In his role as head of equity products for Nordea fund and manager selection, Häkkä is responsible not just for the fund of fund range, but also the guided fund universe currently available in private banking and through unit-linked products – likely to be broadened out to the retail client base.

The third element of his role is white-labelling for retail products, awarding mandates for specialist products where the group does not have the necessary expertise in house. So the high-yield mandate awarded to US investment firm McKay Shields, the emerging market debt fund run by Halbis Partners, the African equity portfolio managed by StanLib and the technology fund outsourced to Wellington, are all the result of screening by Häkkä’s team.

‘With the fund of funds, we’ve tried to take a different approach,’ explains Häkkä.