The Conifer Group, a provider of fund administration, middle office, trading and prime brokerage services to the hedge fund industry, has made several new hires in the firm’s New York office.
Drew Burggraf has joined as vice president and team leader for the New York prime brokerage team while Jarod Riley is the new vice president and Kyle Vedder the client services representative for Conifer’s middle- and back-office (MBO) services business. Pamela Fong has also joined as a shareholder services professional on the fund administration team in New York.
These new hires come at a time of robust growth for Conifer, which in the first half of 2013 signed 22 new clients, representing over 15 per cent client growth, and opened a new office in Halifax, Nova Scotia to complement its existing San Francisco, New York, and Tortola locations. The fund administration group took on several large clients from other administrators, including a highly complex mandate from a credit manager emerging from the Lehman estate, and implemented the firm’s Form PF solution tool. The MBO services unit also added several new clients and completed the deployment of Conifer iConSM, the firm’s cloud-based portfolio accounting, aggregation, reporting and data warehousing tool.
In addition, Conifer increased its presence in the family office space by partnering with its InvestCloud affiliate to provide MBO services and build a fully customised iConSM portal for a large single-family office with investments across the asset-class spectrum. Conifer’s trade execution services platform, ConXSSM, recently extended its relationship with Eze Software Group as it begins an upgrade to a newer version of the Eze Order Management System.
"The rapid expansion of our firm comes at an unprecedented time for the hedge fund industry, which has seen its fourth consecutive quarter of growth. In Q2, it reached USD2.4 trillion in investments and witnessed the total number of firms top 10,000 for the first time since 2006," says Jack McDonald, president and CEO of The Conifer Group. "As positive capital inflows continue to fuel hedge funds of all sizes, we look forward to bringing our proven business expertise and sophisticated technological solutions to a greater share of the space."
Before joining Conifer, Burggraf was an executive director of prime brokerage services at UBS and a senior collateral manager at Morgan Stanley. Riley formerly served as assistant controller for Protege Partners, while Mr. Vedder was an account operations manager at Brown Brothers Harriman. Previously, Fong was an investor relations associate for Morgan Stanley’s private equity funds.
