Eric Davis

Eric Davis is a business leader who specializes in driving transformation for asset managers experiencing large-scale growth. Throughout his 30-year career, he has thrived in high-pressure environments, where outcome-based performance is the gold standard of success.

Currently, as the Head of Business Solutions at Manulife Asset Management, Eric executes Tier-1 strategic initiatives across Asia Pacific, which is tightly integrated with Manulife’s ambition to be one of the Top 5 Asset Managers in Asia.

Some highlights from Eric’s tenure at Manulife include building a department that has executed over 40 strategic projects and operates a key business function for the firm. Among the crucial projects delivered were a WOFE in China, the establishment of an Asset Management Unit in the Philippines, management of a complex merger of business entities in Japan, and the acquisition of the Standard Chartered’s pension business.

Presently, Eric drives the digital customer experience, which is providing continuous improvement for clients across nine APAC markets.

What differentiates Eric is his talent for seeing the big picture of an organization, coupled with a keen ability to manage the execution of the underpinning projects to meet a business’s objective.

He is a firm believer in pragmatic light governance that provides transparent oversight while keeping the organization focused on efficient revenue generation.

Eric honed these skills in his early years at top firms. After university, he founded Go Consulting, a consultancy specializing in high-risk jobs. The company later progressed into executing complex delivery for large firms. Eric always sought out projects that involved the toughest, most challenging programs for the world’s top organizations.

During this time, he signed multi-year engagements with Bank of America, McKinsey & Co, GE Capital, Boeing, and Coca Cola. Each of these firms was going through un-paralleled periods of growth and realized that Asia would be the next market for expansion.

Through his work with these organizations, Eric came into contact with some of the decade’s most transformational business thinkers. He gained profound insights from seeing successful implementations of Six Sigma, Lean Management, and Agile Development.

Building on this experience, Eric was chosen as a long-term consultant for Barclays Global Investors (BGI) to grow iShares. The global financial crisis shifted his work to managing portfolio issues in Japan. From there, he moved on to Hong Kong to work on the APAC portion of the merger that culminated with the BlackRock acquisition of BGI, forming the world’s largest money manager. Post-merger, he followed other senior BGI leadership onto Fidelity Investments to complete the implementation of a cross-asset trading platform.

In 2012, after 20 years in consulting, Eric went on to build KPMG’s Asia Investment Management capability. This work leveraged all of his prior experience and relationships into a focused advisory offering. His clients included top-ranking asset management names as well as family offices.

Post KPMG, Eric briefly returned to consulting and coordinated the Prudential / Standard Chartered bank-assurance renewal, which was the first significant change to the relationship in 20 years, and involved $60 billion in assets.

In his 30-year career, Eric has driven transformation for the asset management industry, creating organizational direction to accommodate high-growth scenarios and establish new revenue streams.

Eric was born in the United States and obtained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina. He has a deep understanding of emerging markets, having lived and worked in the Middle East, Central & Eastern Europe, Turkey, India, China, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Outside of work, Eric supports new enterprises, volunteering his expertise as well as being an angel investor. Currently, he lives in Hong Kong with his Japanese wife and two daughters and enjoys staying in good physical shape.