æ
Mary
Callahan
Erdoes
#74 Powerful Women
At a Glance
Age: 44
Title: CEO, J.P. Morgan Asset
Management
Residence: New York, NY
This year it’s all about reach.
E
urope is in debt crisis, the Middle East is shaking and there’s
market panic at home. The 100 Most Powerful Women were
chosen not just for being on top, but also for being in the middle of Richter-registering events. Their power derives from money and
might, yes, but also (thanks to social media) reach and influence.
Quickly becoming one of the most important figures in banking,
Mary Callahan Erdoes oversees $1.3 trillion as chief of J.P. Morgan
Asset Management. She runs the world's fifth-biggest asset management company, which includes the second-biggest hedge fund and the
nation's most prominent private bank. In her first calendar year on the
job, earnings rose 20% to $1.7 billion on $9 billion of revenues. She fast
made her mark on her business with the acquisition of Gaveá Investimentos, the $7.9 billion investment shop run by Arminio Fraga, Brazil's
former chief central banker.
SEPTEMBER 21, 2011 EDITION
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æ
SEPTEMBER 12 • 2011 EDITION
The $1 Trillion
Woman
How to become a superstar on Wall Street?
Watch Mary Callahan Erdoes.
O
n a sweltering morning in late July Mary Callahan
Erdoes is running on just three hours of sleep—and
running late for an interview. She can’t locate the
nanny for her three kids (ages 9, 7 and 4), probably because the nanny thought Erdoes would return not early this morning but the day after from meetings in
Europe with Russian billionaires and German financiers. Her
homecoming gift: an urgent e-mail (subject line: “Help”) from a
client who was about to buy a company and needed her take on
how currencies would react to the news of a second bailout for
Greece. “Now I am here with you,” she tells me, friendly
enough, but hinting this won’t be a leisurely meeting. “This
whole week has been a blur.”
But hardly unusual for the chief executive of
J.P. Morgan Asset Management, who oversees $1.3 trillion.
Erdoes runs the world’s fifth-biggest asset management company, which includes the second-biggest hedge fund, the nation’s most prominent private bank that serves the ultrawealthy and more than 200 other investment classes. In her
first calendar year on the job, profits rose 20% to $1.7 billion
on revenue of $9 billion.
Competing with the likes of BlackRock and Pimco makes
Erdoes, at age 44, one of the most powerful women on Wall
Street. She is on the shortlist of eventual successors to
JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, along with securities services chief Michael Cavanagh and investment banker
Matthew Zames. Erdoes claims she is far too busy to fantasize
about such ambitions. “If you put someone in a job who is
thinking for even a moment about the next job, you have the
wrong person,” she says.
Standing 5 foot 2, Erdoes has a reputation at J.P. Morgan for
hard work, extreme loyalty to her staff and a knack for making
personal connections. She once traveled cross-country to spend
the day helping a client with Parkinson’s understand different
investment options. But Erdoes is no pushover. She has stood
toe-to-toe with the toughest men in finance, billionaires like
Henry Kravis and Daniel Och, and negotiated exclusive access
to their private equity and hedge funds for J.P. Morgan’s private
banking clients, squeezing favorable terms rare on Wall Street.
“She has empathy for people, and as a woman that sometimes
gets misinterpreted as a weakness,” says James “Jes” Staley, the
number two exec at J.P. Morgan, who runs its investment banking unit. “She is so competitive that she can go up against any
male manager I have ever worked with.”
She must’ve gotten some of that growing up in Winnetka, Ill.,
in an Irish Catholic home with three brothers. She learned
about finance from her father, Patrick Callahan, a Chicago
investment banker who occasionally took her to the office.
Women played a big role during her childhood, too: Erdoes
went to an all-girls Catholic high school, where she excelled at
math while becoming a nationally ranked equestrian. (Her wellconnected grandmother “Izzy” got Erdoes a summer job at a financial firm.) Erdoes was the only female math major in her
class at Georgetown University, where she was afflicted by
doubts about why she was spending hours in the library solving
equations. “I can remember her saying, ‘Dad, my grade point
average can suffer as I go through this,’” recalls Patrick Callahan. “I said, ‘Mary, if you are a math major and you go to an in-
JORDAN HOLLENDER FOR FORBES
BY NATHAN VARDI
“She is so competitive she can go
up against any male manager.”
terview no one will ever ask you your
grade point average.’” She went on to get
an M.B.A. at Harvard, where she met her
husband, Philip Erdoes, a New York venture capitalist.
In 1996 Erdoes left a corporate
finance job at Bankers Trust for J.P.
Morgan’s private bank, managing fixed
income portfolios. She helped revive a
snoozy business, attracting clients who
had just sold a company with money
market products and then broadening
the relationships. Internally she later
settled the often contentious relationship
between traders and portfolio managers
by merging their roles. Still, there was
pushback in 2005 when Erdoes became
the leading candidate to run the private
bank. One senior J.P. Morgan banker
wondered if it was fair to give such a big
job to a mother who then had two young
children. He was overruled. “I can’t
imagine someone saying that about a
man with two children,” Erdoes snaps.
She is the rare female comet in the
male-dominated firmament of Wall
Street. Part of her success sounds pedestrian: putting in exceptionally long
hours to get the attention of her bosses.
“You can send a note to Mary at just
about any time, and you will get a response on the BlackBerry,” says one of
her former mentors, Gordon Fowler Jr.,
now chief of Glenmede Trust. Erdoes
long ago gave up on the idea of achieving a work/life balance and opted for
what she calls “work/life integration.”
She sometimes heads to her children’s
school for afternoon pickup and then
returns to the office. “There is no substitute for hard work,” says Erdoes. “There
is a little luck along the way, but there is
no substitute for really superhard work,
first in, last out.”
Erdoes can take offense at the idea of
special treatment for women. During this
year’s World Economic Forum she spoke
of her disappointment with the conference’s new gender quota system at lunch
with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. Erdoes
then hopped on CNBC with Jamie
Dimon by her side and said, “Unfortunately now when people come to Davos,
they may look at some of these women
and wonder, ‘Are you here because you
are a female or are you here because of
your accomplishments?’”
No question of her accomplishments.
Under her regime the private bank increased its client base 15% a year; assets
grew by $238 billion. By then few were
surprised when a couple of years ago
Dimon asked Erdoes to become chief of
the asset management division and join
the bank’s operating committee as part of
an executive shakeup. Good timing: The
unit was providing a high return on equity without tying up the bank’s increasingly scarce capital. The group also attracted a flood of new money from clients
impressed with the way J.P. Morgan had
tacked through the credit crisis.
Erdoes wanted to expand internationally and enlarge hedge fund and private
equity operations. On one of her first
days on the job she found a way to do
both. She nudged Glenn Dubin, who
runs J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s
biggest hedge fund, Highbridge Capital
Management, to buy Brazil’s Gávea Investimentos, the $7.9 billion investment
shop run by Armino Fraga, Brazil’s former chief central banker. Fraga was not
looking for an alliance, but Dubin and
Erdoes helped convince him to sell a
majority stake, a deal that took a year to
negotiate and close. “The feeling that we
would be connected to J.P. Morgan but
through Mary with her very easy, objective way of handling things drove the
deal,” says Fraga. “She thinks big but
gets stuff done; it is a nice blend.”
As global markets continue their
stomach-clutching gyrations, Erdoes’ investment group looks smart for holding
back on equities earlier this year and betting instead on investment-grade and
high-yield credit. She wants to put together new funds that will focus on distressed European assets and emerging
ones in China. Money has been flowing
into the business, a record $69 billion last
year and $46 billion so far this year. “It’s
just nonstop trying to piece all this stuff
together, and the hardest thing is there is
no road map,” says Erdoes. “It’s oddly exhilarating, because so many things are
happening so fast.” F
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