With offices in Grand Cayman, Ireland and the US, Admiral Administration continues to forge partnerships with small and start-up hedge fund managers, offering skilled staff and an advanced te
With offices in Grand Cayman, Ireland and the US, Admiral Administration continues to forge partnerships with small and start-up hedge fund managers, offering skilled staff and an advanced technology platform that enables clients to keep costs down as they focus on developing and growing their business. Since Admiral’s Irish operation was established in 2007, it has invested heavily in technology, and expanded its offering to deliver a premium service to its clients.
Having initially focused on servicing alternative funds domiciled in offshore jurisdictions including the Cayman Islands, Admiral has expanded its offering to include servicing Irish-domiciled funds as the global alternative investment business responds to market and regulatory changes with increased use of onshore vehicles.
As part of a fund services group with a significant presence in the Cayman market, Admiral Ireland initially served mainly European managers with Cayman offshore funds. However, the firm has now established itself fully in the Irish market and developed links with gatekeepers of the European industry such as prime brokers, law firms and fund consultants.
Over the past two years the market environment has changed for small and start-up hedge fund managers. New managers increasingly need to consider outsourcing various functions rather than carrying them out in-house, both from a cost perspective and more importantly to leverage off an established service provider’s technology and experience.
Admiral focuses on building long-term partnerships with its clients, where the manager and administrator can develop together. The group’s existing client base includes many managers that started with less than USD20m but today run assets in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
Today managers are establishing new funds with significantly less seed capital compared with three or four years ago. Admiral’s flexible approach to client servicing offers an attractive value-added proposition that enables these managers to keep costs down at launch, allowing them to get established, build a track record and attract new capital.
As managers look to reduce their overheads, the firm has complemented its existing model by adding middle-office services including portfolio and risk analytics as well as building out an enhanced automation processing mechanism that enables efficient collection and daily reconciliation of data with third parties such as prime brokers, independent pricing sources and the investment manager.
Admiral has continued to invest in its technological platform to provide straight-through processing and dynamic reporting for its clients. It has created connectivity between the Advent Geneva accounting system, Advent Partner for investor allocations, fee and NAV calculations, and Paladyne Systems data warehousing technology. Integration of these systems facilitates dynamic web reporting for both managers and investors that can be customised to meet the client’s specific needs.
The outlook is particularly promising for Admiral and the Irish fund industry as a whole as looming regulatory change prompts more managers to consider creating onshore fund structures or redomiciling funds from other jurisdictions to Ireland.
Legislation introduced late last year to facilitate redomiciliation has helped position Ireland as the jurisdiction of choice for moving funds onshore. The country is well placed to become the leading European domicile as well as the primary global servicing centre for hedge funds, with structures at regulatory, service provider and product level that meet the requirements demanded by investors.
David Whelan is managing director of Admiral Administration (Ireland)
Please click here to read the full Hedgeweek special report on Ireland Hegde Fund Services 2010
