ACROSS THE AISLE

Bennelong Funds Management is like a mainline into the jugular of Australia's financial advice sector, with more than 6500 advisers channelling capital to its funds. But its global chief executive John Burke says the job's not done yet.

- Andrew McKean writes.

John Burke's DNA runs back to Dublin, Ireland. His old man plied his trade in the sales and advertising game for wines and spirits - originally Irish whisky, of which there are almost as many barrels ageing on the island today as there are living souls to drink them.

Burke's father's work took the family to the US for a few years when he was a young child and then to Perth, Scotland.

He stayed through secondary school before rocking up to the University of St Andrews for a master's in history and economics.

"That was a really fabulous place to go. There's no one living at home, it's always been a campus university - everyone came from afar, there are a lot of foreign students... it's a great place to meet people and make friends because you're on your own," he says.

Bubbling social atmosphere aside, Burke speaks fondly of the classroom. History and economics had long held his interest, each discipline sharpening the other.

He says you can't really understand major historical events without also grasping the economic forces behind them, noting that most revolutions are blown open by poverty, unmet expectations, or regimes burdening their populations with punitive taxes.

Toward the end of his studies, Burke found himself drawn to finance over history. The latter, he felt, demanded too much reading and time, something that would dull the shine of his university experience. Meantime, the UK economy, in the depths of recession at this stage, was being pulled out of the doldrums by the financial services sector in London.

Graduate programs in consultancies, banks, fund managers, and law firms were snapping up the lion's share of graduates, including Burke.

Burke got picked up by a company that would later become Accenture, moving to London in 1996.