Chief Executive Officer & Director, Franklin Resources Inc
Jenny Johnson On 'Crisis to Creation: Navigating a Disruptive World' | Franklin Templeton | GBS 2024
GBS 2024: Jenny Johnson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Franklin Templeton joins Ajaya Sharma, Senior Editor, ET NOW, for an exclusive conversation on 'Crisis to Creation: Navigating a Disruptive World'.
The Times Group presents ET Now Global Business Summit, in its 8th edition in 2024, is a one-of-a-kind gathering where we celebrate the present and anticipate the future. Since its inception in 2015, the Global Business Summit has emerged as Asia’s premier meeting place where global thought leaders and experts congregate to discuss ideas and actions for the future. It is an unparalle...
About Jennifer Johnson
Jennifer Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton, has been a featured speaker at multiple conferences in early 2026 discussing the convergence of traditional finance and blockchain technology. At the Future of Digital Assets summit, she argued that blockchain is a "programming language" that provides a "source of truth" and reduces costs in financial services, citing her firm’s tokenized money market fund as an example where transaction costs dropped from about $130 to less than a dollar when run on the Stellar blockchain. She stated her belief that "the entire financial systems rails will be replaced by blockchain just because of the efficiency of it" and that all traditional securities will ultimately be tokenized. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Johnson said she believes "2026 is the year where TradFi and DeFi start to have a convergence." Johnson also spoke about private market opportunities, describing secondary private equity and real estate debt as attractive areas given the need for liquidity. On the topic of artificial intelligence, Johnson told the FII Institute that "any business in any industry that isn't focused on trying to think about how they should leverage AI is going to become obsolete." She said Franklin Templeton is using AI to generate first drafts of client proposals in 15 minutes that previously took 15 to 18 hours, and is building an "intelligence hub" platform for its distribution teams. On an earnings call, she noted that the company is using a multi-agent orchestration approach with a partner called Wand, backed by venture firms including Thiel Capital. Johnson has also spoken about the importance of diverse investment teams, saying that women entrepreneurs receive only about 2% of venture capital despite having "twice the returns" on average, and that a lack of diversity can lead to missed investment opportunities.
Transcript (14 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:00
Today I'm going to take the discussion forward with Jenny Johnson. She's the CEO of Franklin Templeton, a $1.5 trillion asset manager globally, and she's been around 35 years doing it. Franklin, by the way, is also one of the oldest global organizations to come to India with the mandate of asset management, right, Jenny? So great to have you. Thanks so much for being part of ET Now GBS this year. From your vantage point, you've been listening to our ministers and leaders around here. As I was researching about you, I observed that you seem to be traveling a lot at many global platforms. What did you find different at ET GBS this time around, something which you took notice of?
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Jennifer Johnson0:54
Yeah, so one of the comments we were talking about earlier is I was just trying to imagine doing an event like this in the US and having the president, the vice president, and so many what we call secretaries but equivalent of your ministers accessible like this. I can't imagine. I don't think there is an event. So I've just been impressed with the pretty candid conversations. I loved the minister of railroads, listening to him talk. He sounds like a business person. You have this many miles you want to travel on road, this many miles you want to travel on rail, and that's the right way to think about it to be able to advance it. So taking that kind of practical approach, it's just been really interesting to observe the accessibility and what appears to be the transparency of the various folks. So it's been a worthwhile time.
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Interviewer1:52
Great, and that's what ET's job is: to bring the policy makers and all the stakeholders close to each other and have all the relevant conversations. As a practitioner of money management, somebody who's been running this organization at such a senior level, how does India appear now? Because you have a very vast history of how the Indian economic scene has been. Franklin has been observing it from the very late two, three decades now.
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Jennifer Johnson2:18
Yes, we set up an asset management. We were the first foreign manager back in 1995 to come to India and have been here for 27 years today. 20% of our workforce is based in India. I actually lived for a short period of time with my family, and my kids went to school in Hyderabad. So I've really seen India grow over the last 27 years. There was always a saying, I know you all know this: 'India grows at night while the government sleeps.' I would laugh because I would always say to people, 'Come on, this is an economy with 56% of the population under age 25, a British-oriented legal system, some of the top education. There's so much opportunity.' And the expat Indians were always the most skeptical. They say, 'They never can get it done. It's always the promising future.' For the first time, and it's really happened over the last two years, I noticed the change: Indians are the most positive on India, who were skeptical. What you have is what historically was a headwind to opportunity, which was the government slowing it down, hence growing at night, to now much more of a tailwind. It's like being a chef and walking into this phenomenal kitchen. Now it's about putting it together. The combination of programs and policies being organized are really making great strides. I think pulling together what to me is a tremendous opportunity. For Franklin Templeton, we set up in 1995 because we believed there'd be an opportunity, and the industry has grown, but it's still only 5% of the population that actually has mutual funds and saves. So we're now incredibly excited about what the future is going to be.
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Interviewer4:30
That's correct. There's a data point which shows that stock market participants and mutual fund participants are very tiny compared to Netflix subscribers in India. So this category is growing, but there's a furious bull market going on in India. India is the best performing globally. Do you still see good tailwinds for Indian asset management and in Indian market prospects? I'm not talking about a quarter or a year, but the vast majority of people. Indian investors are smartening up, they are taking longer term bets. What would your message to them be?
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Jennifer Johnson5:06
Look at the greatest opportunity for us in the asset management business: a growing middle class. Growth begets growth. The domestic economy grows, people's wealth grows, people end up wanting to save for the future. A lot of people talk about the middle class in India going from 20-something percent to 40-something percent. All of those become great investors and clients and opportunities for us. Then you just look at the sheer size of a country of 1.4 billion people with growing per capita income. It's a tremendous opportunity.
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Interviewer5:42
I want to understand the foreign investor's view as well. In the last one year, I would say last few years, a third front has emerged in India: the retail investor, almost nudging 19,000 crores coming to Indian markets every month in the form of SIPs. So the faith of the Indian investor is rock solid. But in the last one and a half years, the foreign investor into India, the flows have been negative. Do you see that reverse in the next few years? Is that a temporary phenomenon?
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Jennifer Johnson6:13
Yeah, capital goes where capital is treated well. So as policies improve in India and make it more welcoming for currencies to come in and investments to come in, you're going to absolutely see more flows coming in. People recognize the India story, but there's often a view that if you did private equity in India, your joint venture partner always made money and you didn't make your money, you couldn't get it out. So those things have to be addressed. But as they're addressed, and obviously with a growing economy which we can clearly see India is, then the opportunity for foreign direct investment... I think things like GIFT City are clearly an initiative designed to bring money into India, and those kinds of incentives are incredibly effective.
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Interviewer7:03
Give us some flavor of Franklin's India plans. You spoke about GIFT City, I'm assuming you already planning an office there. But this place is getting very competitive. New mutual funds are getting launched, fund managers are breaking away starting their own outfits and scaling up. The number of affluent investors in India, the highest growth across anywhere in the world is India affluent investors. What are our plans to capture this growth, to make a business larger? Some color on Franklin's India plans.
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Jennifer Johnson7:34
Well, it's one thing to offer mutual funds. I think the key that we've always focused on is also adding things like financial education, the ecosystem around that. It's a really interesting time in the industry because you have a combination. Our Franklin Templeton Academy actually came out of India because we found that we needed to educate people to make them better investors. We thought that would be a developing market opportunity, but the honest answer is everywhere across the world there's a need for financial education. So our Academy is something we launched here but we leverage it globally. I think technology is bringing really interesting tools to reach more people and customize more specific portfolios. So I think you're going to see an evolution from 'let me get exposure to large cap stocks' to 'here are my goals, build a portfolio that's more specifically designed to those goals.' Finally, blockchain will drive down the cost of delivering some of these types of products. It's still very nascent, but it will happen, and that is going to be incredibly effective in India because it becomes much greater for financial inclusion.
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Interviewer8:56
One last point I want to discuss with you. Please permit me to be a little personal. I see you such a flourishing career, in an enviable position you are at, CEO of Franklin. But in the financial markets, not only India but globally, how do you see the role of women? What did it take to come to the leadership position? What would your message be? Women participation in financial markets in India is also growing, and whatever message you'll send out will actually make a deep impact. What would your message be, some learnings?
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Jennifer Johnson9:29
One of the things from learning... I have five children and three daughters. I asked my kids, 'Are any of you going to follow me in this business?' One of my daughters said, 'Oh no, Mom, I want to do something that helps people.' I thought, 'How cool is that? This business helps people.' But it made me realize that we don't talk about it in such a way as effectively solving people's problems, helping them with medical expenses if they need to, or saving money to send their children to better education. So one is, as an industry, we've got to talk about it better. Two, a diverse group of investment people will uncover more ideas. So it's really important that you have diversity in your investment teams because they will find opportunity that others may miss if they don't have that same perspective. So getting more women in is really important.
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Interviewer10:30
Outstanding. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jenny. It was wonderful to have you.
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Jennifer Johnson10:34
Thank you so much for having me.