Baillie Gifford concludes voluntary exit programme with 160 jobs cut. 23 Sep 2026 Reading time: 2 minutes Baillie Gifford has concluded its voluntary exit programme, which will see around 160 jobs cut across its UK business. The move was part of a plan to position itself for the future. The asset manager launched the voluntary exit programme in July, following its move to its new Edinburgh office in Haymarket Square. The firm did not disclose which areas of its business were impacted by the scheme. It is understood that the firm offered an enhanced packed for staff who took the voluntary redundancy and is similar to other voluntary exit programmes by other asset managers. According to its website, the firm employs 1,607 staff across the world, managing more than £200bn in assets. A spokesperson for Baillie Gifford said: "Our voluntary exit programme has now concluded. We're pleased with the outcome and the level of interest was broadly in line with our planning assumptions. The programme has accelerated our move towards more efficient ways of working, while retaining capabilities we need for the future. "During a period of rapid growth, particularly through the pandemic, we increased our headcount significantly. Since then, we've learned a lot about how we can work differently, making better use of technology and building a more efficient and scalable business. "The programme will help us reshape the firm for the future, giving colleagues choice while allowing us to adjust capacity in some areas and invest in the skills we need in others. "We have strong teams across the firm and, as a private partnership, have always taken a long-term approach to succession and transition. We remain focused on our existing clients while investing for future growth, including in private companies, tokenisation and active ETFs."

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Baillie Gifford, Essentia analytica partner for AI Program. Baillie Gifford is a founding partner in Essentia's new AI Partner Program, helping shape Essentia Data-Out, the behavioral intelligence layer that feeds decision-quality data into an asset manager's own AI environment Essentia Analytics, a leading provider of behavioral analytics and decision-making insights for investment professionals, and Baillie Gifford, the independent, Edinburgh-based investment management partnership, announced a partnership to develop Essentia Data-Out (EDO), a new offering that delivers Essentia's behavioral intelligence directly into an asset manager's own data and AI environment. Baillie Gifford is a founding partner in Essentia's new AI Partner Program (AIPP). Every serious asset manager maintains an AI stack: large language models and agents processing and interpreting the firm's proprietary and third-party data. That data is generally rich in general market and securities performance information, but very little of it describes the one thing a firm has full ownership of: the quality of its investment decision-making. Essentia Data-Out fills that gap. It delivers Essentia's proprietary behavioral analytics - measures of skill and decision-making at the portfolio manager, team and firm level - into a firm's own cloud data environment through a secure Snowflake data share, where it can enrich the firm's own models, agents and oversight tools. Essentia Data-Out is grounded in Essentia's proprietary Behavioral Alpha(R) methodology, which is peer-reviewed and has been road-tested and refined over more than a decade with hundreds of top equity portfolio managers around the world. As one of the founding members of Essentia's AI Partner Program, Baillie Gifford - an existing Essentia client - receives early access to each new EDO release and helps define the EDO roadmap, including which Essentia metrics and analyses are developed next. "Your AI is only as good as the data it can consume," says Clare Flynn Levy, Founder and CEO of Essentia Analytics. "Firms are feeding their AI stacks every kind of market and fundamental data, but almost none of them are including the one thing they are ultimately paid for: the quality of their own decisions. Essentia Data-Out makes that behavioral intelligence a native part of the stack. Now, a portfolio manager pondering a decision will be able to ask their AI and get a robust and reliable response from Essentia about how that decision maps to the patterns we've detected in their past behavior." "As long-term active investors, we are always looking for ways to improve the quality of our investment decision-making," says James Taylor, Head of Investment Analytics at Baillie Gifford. "We work with partners like Essentia to bring in distinctive data and research alongside our proprietary analysis, so that we can help our investors to understand their decisions from a robust, evidence-based perspective. This helps us to systematically learn from the decisions we make, continuously improve our investment process and, ultimately, support our aim of delivering better long-term outcomes for our clients." Essentia is inviting a select group of AI-forward investment firms to join the AI Partner Program and help shape Essentia Data-Out as it develops. And receive exclusive articles on securities markets The 2026 Global Markets Choice Awards are here! Nominations are officially OPEN for the celebration of excellence in global capital markets trading & technology. Nominate below: https://www.jotform.com/form/260086385121150 Delaware Life Insurance Company is becoming the first insurance carrier to offer an index that contains cryptocurrency, adding the BlackRock U.S. Equity Bitcoin Balanced Risk 12% Index to its fixed index annuity (FIA) portfolio. As the digital assets industry pushes toward Franklin Templeton is expanding its tokenized fund suite, signaling growing institutional demand for blockchain-based fund infrastructure and regulated investment products moving onchain. Read the full article below: $50 billion in active ETF inflows helped fuel a record year for @BlackRock 's iShares business, as investors continue to lean into active strategies.