Businessman brings natural Irish talents to US high finance

Kip Condron reckons that several hundred people with Irish blood were killed in the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre on September 11th, which claimed some 5,000 lives.

"They were from two general groups of people," said the president and chief executive of AXA Financial, the US arm of the world's biggest insurance company. "One was the firefighters of New York who have a long history of people of Irish heritage. The other was the large number of executives who have a shorter history but a growing influence on Wall Street.

"I don't think there was any ethnic group that lost as many people."

Christopher "Kip" Condron (54) is best known in New York's Irish-American community as one of the top fund-raisers for the American Ireland Fund. Two years ago he set a record when he raised $1.6 million (€1.8 million) as guest of honour at the annual American Ireland Fund dinner in Manhattan, compared to the previous highest total of $1 million. Now, he said in an interview, the American Ireland Fund had decided to give $1 million dollars to the victims of the September 11th attacks.

"So much money has been raised for Ireland during its periods of need, there was a strong feeling that it was a way of giving something back to America," he said.

"The purpose of the Ireland Fund is for causes in Ireland but so many people of Irish heritage were affected by the terrorist attacks in New York. There has been such a groundswell of support for people who have been affected by this, in Ireland in particular."

Mr Condron is originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, an Irish Catholic coal-mining town "where we thought wasps were the things that stung you in August and we didn't know what White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were".

His grandfather, the son of Irish immigrants, started work at the age of nine picking slate from coal in the Scranton mines but went on to educate himself and become superintendent of one of the large coal companies.

"He was a very smart guy for whom it was a matter of pride that both his sons went to Holy Cross College," said Mr Condron. "We were brought up in Scranton to assume that, if there was one ethnic group that everyone else would look up to, it was the Irish Catholics. When I later heard the term 'Roman Catholic', I asked, what's a Roman Catholic? I was probably 18 years old before I knew that Roman Catholic was the religion and the Irish Catholics were an ethnic group with the religion as well. It wasn't until I got out of Scranton and looked around I realised, Gee! The whole world doesn't look at you that way. It was a little bit of an awakening."

As a business graduate from Scranton University, with a wife and three young sons, he took the risky step in 1978 of remortgaging his house to found Condron Associates, a consulting business that advised executives in big companies about their personal finances.

Having acquired some big names in his portfolio, such as Westinghouse and Pfizer, Condron Associates was bought out in 1985 by AYCO, the financial and tax planning subsidiary of American Express (AmEx), which made him AYCO co-president.

In 1989 AmEx appointed him head of the venerable money manager, The Boston Company, which was subsequently bought in 1992 by Pittsburgh-based Mellon Bank.

Mr Condron made a big impact at Mellon. In 1995 he became president and chief operating officer of Mellon's Dreyfus Funds and in 1998 president and chief operating officer of Mellon Financial Corporation.

He is credited with aggressively shaking up Dreyfus Funds to make it one of the biggest bank-owned asset management units in the US. He compared the funds to a "two-legged stool" that emphasised bond and money market funds almost to the exclusion of stocks - something he set out to change.

He admits to being a tough boss. "I am impatient and I am demanding," he said. "Anybody who is successful has to be both of those, though you can be demanding without being obnoxious and I think you can be impatient without being unreasonable. In the world in which we live, where your earnings are reported every quarter, there's a lot of pressure to perform, to perform now, not tomorrow or next year, and that takes a certain commitment and tenacity and focus. What drives me is a good healthy fear of failure. You just won't fail and therefore you will succeed."

Mr Condron made news on Wall Street this summer when he left Mellon Bank to head up the US unit of Paris-based AXA, the global insurance company that owns Guardian PMPA, the Republic's largest motor insurer and sponsors the FA Cup in Britain. The move surprised some banking analysts, who speculated that he was frustrated at not getting the top job in Mellon and wanted to run his own show in a big financial company.

AXA's French chairman, Mr Claude BΘbΘar, known as the "Crocodile" because of his success as a business predator, may have seen in Mr Condron something of himself, as he also had a provincial background and a record for turning a mutual society into an industry giant.

On taking over the US unit of AXA, which incorporates AXA Advisors, Equitable Life Assurance Society, Sanford C. Bernstein and Alliance Capital Management, Mr Condron saw his challenge as the need to drive the company forward in a slowing economy, which he did not expect to pick up until 2002.

Now his task has been sharply redefined. He has to see AXA Financial through the volatile aftermath of the September 11th attacks, plus a recession that he believes will last well into next year, and a war unlike any other.

The attack on the World Trade Centre dealt AXA a double blow, hitting its insurance business hard. "Worldwide AXA's exposure will be in the neighbourhood of $600 million," said Mr Condron. "However most of that is reinsurance, which has to do with the building coverage. In terms of life insurance we expect our total exposure to be under $50 million."

The attacks worsened an economic climate that was already hurting business. On October 11th AXA announced in Paris that it would make a radical change in strategy to reduce dependence of its profits on equity markets.

It said it would cut annual costs by $640 million to $915 million, of which $250 million would be in the United States. The decline of stock markets around the world had severely reduced AXA revenues from earnings on asset management and investments, a factor that was exacerbated by the fate of some companies directly affected by the attacks - AXA for example reportedly held $2.3 billion in airline stocks.

"We are in the process of taking $250 million in costs out of the business but those decisions were already in motion and do not directly relate to September 11th," Mr Condron said. "It's a time when we have to get our costs in line with our current revenues. Since September 11th I would say that there is a further softening in the economies around the world, particularly in the US, and you can see it in the announced lay-offs of large companies in financial services and other industries not just in the US but around the world.

"I think we are in a recession which is going to go on for several quarters at least and most well-managed companies are reacting by managing their costs. The other wild card is - particularly in the US - what the effect of this war will have on our economy, and how it will drive the future of the economy."

Mr Condron joked at an event held earlier in the year that the term "Wall Street Irish" sounded like an oxymoron. "The Irish can be poets and they can be successful at writing and thinking but shy away from making money," he said, although in fact their "people skills" made them a natural in the financial world.

As treasurer of the American Ireland Fund, he has travelled to Belfast to see for himself how some of the money he helped raise is used.

"I believe in the things the Ireland Fund is trying to do," he said. "In spite of how strong the economy has been in Ireland, there are still pockets of poverty and need, and the fund helps to fill some of those."

He acknowledged that fund-raising had been made more difficult by the vast outpouring of money from corporate America and from private citizens for the victims of the terrorist attacks.

"I think there has been a short-term effect on fundraising because so much money has been raised in a short time for the victims so there is still a lot of concern among all other worthy causes that money has been flowing not to them but to causes surrounding the terrorist acts," he said.

"I think that will settle down and people will be more broad in their charitable focus as the distance from September 11th increases."

Like all business leaders in New York, the catastrophe of September 11th affected him deeply.

"I lost a number of friends who unfortunately didn't make it out of the Trade Centre," he said. "It has affected everyone because everyone knows someone who died. Every day you hear another story about someone who did get out and someone who didn't. It's something we will have to live with for a long time."