Letter from Riversmeet: Q2 2026

We're one quarter into Riversmeet's life, and this feels like a good moment to share what we're seeing, not as a market report, but as practitioners who spend their days in conversations with the people running, building, and governing investment firms across the UK.

Here are five things that have struck us this quarter.

The tone of mandates has shifted

Something has changed in the briefs we're seeing. Twelve months ago, most senior searches were replacement hires: someone left, find someone similar. That still happens, but the mix has shifted noticeably. A growing proportion of the mandates we're working on are transformation roles: new positions created to address a strategic gap, or existing roles being fundamentally redefined before the search begins.

A Head of Distribution role that's really about building a direct-to-institutional channel that doesn't exist yet. A CIO search where the board has acknowledged that the next leader needs a completely different skill set from the departing one. A COO mandate that's less about running operations and more about rebuilding the technology and data architecture from the ground up.

This is healthy. It means firms are thinking harder about what they need, rather than reflexively replacing like with like. But it also makes searches more complex and more advisory-intensive. When you're hiring for a role that didn't previously exist, the definition work is as important as the candidate identification.

Pension fund consolidation is creating a new kind of leader

The consolidation of UK pension funds, driven by regulation, cost pressure, and the pursuit of scale, is creating leadership roles that have no direct precedent. When three or four pension schemes merge their investment functions, who leads the combined operation? The answer isn't simply "the best CIO from the constituent schemes."

The leader who emerges from consolidation needs to integrate different investment philosophies, reconcile competing stakeholder expectations, manage the politics of teams being combined (and, inevitably, reduced), and build a governance framework for something that didn't exist six months ago. This is a change management challenge wrapped in an investment leadership role.

We're not sure the market has enough people with the right combination of investment credibility and organisational transformation experience to meet the demand that pension consolidation is creating. This will be one of the defining talent challenges in UK institutional investment over the next three to five years.

Everyone wants AI. Nobody knows what they want from it.

AI appears in virtually every brief we see. "Must understand AI." "Experience deploying AI in an investment context." "Ability to develop an AI strategy."

When we probe what this actually means, the answers are strikingly vague. Most organisations know they need to do something with AI. The board expects it, clients are asking about it, competitors are making announcements about it. But very few have a clear view of what specific problems AI should solve in their investment or operational process, what "good" looks like, or how to evaluate whether a leader genuinely understands this space versus being fluent in the buzzwords.

This creates an odd dynamic in search processes. Candidates are incentivised to overstate their AI credentials. Clients aren't equipped to test those claims rigorously. The result is a lot of conversations where both sides are performing confidence about a topic that neither fully understands.

Our advice to clients: before adding AI to a job specification, answer three questions. What specific decisions or processes do you want AI to improve? What data do you have to support those applications? And who in your organisation will evaluate whether a candidate's claims about AI are substantive? If you can't answer those questions, the AI requirement in your spec is decorative.

The alternative asset COO gap

Alternative asset managers (private equity, private credit, infrastructure, real estate) are struggling to find COOs. Not because there's a shortage of operational leaders in financial services, but because the role requires an unusual combination of deep understanding of investment operations (fund administration, portfolio monitoring, investor reporting) alongside genuine fluency in the investment process itself.

In traditional asset management, the COO and the CIO operate in relatively distinct domains. In alternatives, the boundary is blurred. The COO needs to understand deal structuring, valuation methodology, and the operational implications of investment decisions in a way that goes well beyond back-office management.

The candidates who have this combination tend to have grown up inside alternative asset firms, and they understand the business intuitively. But the supply of these people hasn't kept pace with the growth of the alternatives sector. Firms are either competing aggressively for a thin pool of experienced candidates, or taking bets on people from adjacent sectors who have some of the skills but not the full picture.

The alternative asset managers that solve this problem will be the ones who invest in developing COO-track talent internally, rather than assuming they can always buy it from the market. But that requires a longer time horizon than most firms operate on.

What surprised us

We went into this quarter expecting the market to feel cautious. The macro environment, with its tariff uncertainty, rate trajectory, and geopolitical complexity, suggested that firms would be conservative about senior hiring.

That hasn't been the case. The volume of senior mandates has been stronger than we anticipated. Our read is that boards and leadership teams have decided that the uncertainty is structural, not cyclical. It isn't going away, and delaying leadership decisions until the environment clarifies is no longer a viable strategy. If anything, uncertainty is accelerating the demand for strong leadership, because the cost of having the wrong person in a key role is higher when the environment is volatile.

What has surprised us is the candour. We've had more honest conversations with boards and CEOs about what's really going on in their organisations, the genuine challenges, the cultural issues, the strategic uncertainties, than we expected at this stage of our firm's development. There seems to be an appetite for advisers who will engage with the real picture, not just the polished version.

That's what we're trying to build. We'll keep sharing what we see.

Amanda and Matt