From magic acts to Goldman Sachs and beyond: the US finance whiz helping kickstart UK growth

Shortly before Christmas 1997, Tracy Blackwell found herself in New York with nothing but two suitcases and the sinking feeling that she would have to make another fresh start. At 30, she had just moved there from London with her employer, Goldman Sachs. And while she safely made it stateside, a transatlantic cargo ship had capsized off the Azores, taking all her worldly possessions with it.

“You can look back and laugh, but at the time … you don’t know where to start,” Blackwell says. But the US native was more than up to starting from scratch. Back in the UK since the early years of this century, she has risen to chief executive of the London-based Pension Insurance Corporation (PIC), a City firm that helps companies offload the risks of their final salary pension schemes.

Since its founding in 2006, PIC has become a market leader in defined benefit pension buyouts, managing the retirement schemes of more than 339,900 policyholders employed by companies including M&S, De Beers and Cadbury.

As a major investor with, managing assets of £46.8bn, PIC – and Blackwell, who sits on Labour’s British infrastructure council – has the ear of the new government, as chancellor Rachel Reeves seeks to attract cash for her national wealth fund (NWF), launched last week .

This is a kind of power Blackwell never expected to hold. Born in the US rustbelt to a single mother aged just 18, she did not have an easy start. But Blackwell did not intend to stay in Rockford, Illinois, long.

“I was in the catchment area for the best high school and I was one of the poorest ones there,” Blackwell says. “I realised that I wanted to do something and I wasn’t going to succeed living in Rockford.”

So with money saved from an after-school job scooping ice-cream at Baskin-Robbins, she jumped on a plane to tour Europe. It was a transformative experience for the 17-year-old, whose only previous travel experience was a trip to Hawaii won in a breakfast cereal competition five years earlier.

In 1985, as a way of keeping her options open, she enrolled in the University of Illinois’s Gies College of Business. But while working 80-hour weeks – including a stint as a magician’s assistant – to fund her studies, Blackwell was inspired by a finance professor to pursue an interest in financial markets.

“I love markets, because it’s everything. It’s how an individual business is running, it’s geopolitics, it’s national politics, it’s the news … It’s the living embodiment of what’s going on in the world. And that’s what I found fascinating.”

After doing an MBA, she clinched an interview with Goldman Sachs in London. Passed over for a role in investment banking (she was later told she did not have the right “pedigree”), Blackwell was offered a job in the burgeoning derivatives industry, trading futures contracts, options and swaps, which had been invented just a year earlier.

Blackwell, 56, gets a glint in her eye when she talks about those early years at Goldman, where she eventually moved into asset management. But then came the bank’s IPO in 1999.

“The whole culture changed. It became much more ruthless, and less like a family,” Blackwell says. She left the City altogether and move to Norfolk with her husband as she considered her next move.

In 2004, she was lured back to finance by former Goldman colleague Danny Truell, who had since become chief investment officer at the Wellcome Trust .

Danny and his brother, Eddie, had watched the UK’s 2004 pension reforms with interest. Companies suddenly had to make ironclad guarantees to pay final salary pensions, having previously only paid out if financial conditions allowed. With pension schemes turning into hard liabilities on balance sheets, and requiring more funding every year, companies started closing and offloading those schemes to professional investors that could fund and manage them properly. The Truells saw an opportunity.

They pitched the idea to Goldman, which turned them down only to start its own rival, Rothesay, a year later. Blackwell’s interest was piqued and she joined what would become PIC, which made money through surplus returns on long-term investments, including in infrastructure such as universities, renewable energy and social housing.

It is imperative we get growth going. There is no question the planning system is holding it up

Tracy Blackwell

After the 2007-08 financial crisis, PIC started striking pension deals, first with an engineering firm called Swan Hill. Other notable buyouts included a £660m deal with Cadbury and a £1.2bn deal with EMI, for which Blackwell’s team went head to head with Goldman.

Blackwell has worked her way to the top of PIC, which now manages assets worth nearly £50bn. She has about £12bn invested in UK infrastructure, a figure both she and the Labour party would like to see grow.

Newly installed ministers are hoping to jump-start investment, by getting rid of red tape through planning reforms and by spreading the risk though Reeves’s NWF, which aims to raise £3 in private cash for every £1 of state money put into projects including ports, gigafactories, hydrogen and steel.

“If it works, brilliant,” Blackwell says. “It is imperative we get growth going. There is no question the planning system is holding it up.”

There are wider bureaucratic problems, too, she says, particularly the way projects need approval from a wide array of arm’s-length public bodies. Her solution is to ensure that all such bodies have a “growth mantra”, and to offer businesses an easy way to bring frustrating delays to central government’s notice.

“There’s a lot of really good ideas out there,” Blackwell says. “Some of this stuff just needs to be brought to the government’s attention faster, and they need to do something about it faster. If you’re an investor, you’re not gonna wait for three years to do anything. You’re gonna go somewhere else, because we can invest globally.”

CV

Age 56
Family Married with one son.
Education Studied business at Illinois Urbana-Champaign University.
Pay Undisclosed.
Last holiday A trip to Cyprus, “escaping the rain”.
Best advice she’s been given “I struggle to think of any advice I have been given over the years, but the advice I give is to be yourself.”
Biggest career mistake “Trying to be something I wasn’t. When I decided to be myself, I really started to succeed.”
Word she overuses “Basically”, probably because her teenage son uses it “all the time”.
How she relaxes Being outside, whether hiking, sailing, or swimming