Maitland is one of the industry’s largest independent hedge fund administrators with USD250 billion in AuA and more than 1,400 employees across 18 offices globally across 13 jurisdictions. Maitland is more than a fund administrator. It is a global advisory group, with its roots as an innovative law firm founded in Luxembourg in 1976 offering cross-border structuring solutions to corporates and some of the world’s wealthiest families.
Benjamin Reid is Senior Manager – Business Development & Client Management (LatAm), overseeing Maitland’s expansion efforts into the Latin American market; an exciting region for growth, in particular Brazil.
“We’ve only been operating in Latin America for five years and we’ve really only focused on hedge funds for the past three years. Within that time we’ve gone from zero to 52 funds. The real focus has been providing client service to Brazilian managers offshore.
“Brazil is culturally very different to the offshore world and before entering the market, we asked ourselves, `Where is there a gap with the attention to detail and service given to Brazilian managers locally versus offshore?’ and we adapted the onshore Brazilian model offshore. We work closely with law firms and help clients through the whole process of setting up and running an offshore hedge fund,” explains Reid.
Reid and his team visit Brazil every six weeks. One of the benefits that Maitland offers is that its back-office operations team is based out of Halifax, Canada. This means that all of Maitland’s North American and Latin American clients have their funds processed in the same time zone, which has proven to be a real value-add.
Brazilian managers tend to follow three options when looking to go offshore.
The first option is where a manager sets up a fund offshore whilst maintaining their onshore track record. This might involve setting up a mini-master in Cayman to target US institutional and non-institutional investors, with the onshore and offshore strategies effectively mirroring one another.
The second option involves setting up a Cayman entity to access both the US and European markets; here, says Reid, approximately 30 per cent of a manager’s domestic fund will be done through a feeder fund.
The third option involves solely using an offshore vehicle. “Currently, we have six managers using purely offshore vehicles while the rest of our clients, because of their size, prefer to have an offshore feeder into their domestic fund,” says Reid.
Reid grew up in Portugal and has spent the last decade focusing on Latin America. The rest of the team are all Brazilian nationals, giving Maitland unique cultural expertise.
“We are able to bring the offshore to local. We understand everything from the structuring side to the very detailed aspects that go with the monthly and daily NAVs, from a Brazilian and Latin American perspective. When a client joins us we ensure they don’t fall into a black hole and that the post sale is more important that the actual sale. Clients understand from the outset who the team is that will be servicing them and who their point of contact is to raise escalations and so forth,” explains Reid.
He says that the current pipeline should increase Maitland’s AuA in LatAm from USD2 billion to USD3 billion by early 2018.
On winning this year’s award, he remarks: “We don’t define success just on the number of funds or assets under management. It must also be about the quality of the partnership. When clients trust us enough to continually challenge us to come up with customised solutions – that’s a more enduring mark of success.”
