A multinational European asset manager is about to make a bigger push on this side of the pond.

Laurent Ramsey Pictet Asset Management CEO

Yesterday Laurent Ramsey, CEO of Pictet Asset Management, confirmed that the Geneva-based firm will open its first U.S. next year. Ramsey, speaking last at the firm's media cocktail party at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn, New York, said that the plan is to open a U.S. office in midtown Manhattan in the first half of 2020. Liz Dillon, head of Pictet AM's U.S. intermediaries group and subadvisory, will come back from London to lead the new office, which will include about a dozen people.

Pictet AM is one of three arms (the others are wealth management and asset servicing) of the Pictet Group, a private bank that was founded in 1805 and is still privately held as a partnership. Pictet AM includes more than 970 people (out of about 4,300 in all of Pictet), and the asset manager had more than $192 billion in AUM as of September 30.

Pictet has been investing in the U.S. since 1900, Ramsey said, and the Pictet AM team has been working with U.S. clients for 30 years, covering them with teams in Montreal and London. Much of the asset manager's U.S. work is institutional, and they subadvise several mutual funds.

Today the Pictet AM team is hosting a client conference in New York for the first time. The conference, like the cocktail party last night, features guest speaker Niall Ferguson, a historian and Pictet ally who is the managing director of Greenmantle.

Dillon, an alumna of the State University of New York's College at Brockport, has worked with Pictet AM for more than 17 years. Prior to that she worked with J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch. 

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