The City of Zurich Pension Fund has chosen Citco to provide administration, custody and related financial services to its USD1.3bn hedge fund portfolios.
The mandate follows a series of other key wins from institutional investors, driven by demand for customised portfolios.
Earlier in the year Baloise Group, a European provider of insurance and pension solutions with CHF54bn of insurance assets, strengthened its long standing relationship with Citco by deploying the ÆXIMO technology for outsourced middle office operations. It allows investors full portfolio planning and dealing, including liquidity reporting, asset allocation breakdown, compliance checks and performance reporting. The custodial system has been enhanced to offer a more granular data to our clients, information that Institutional Investors need to manage their portfolio.
Florian Albrecht from Baloise Asset Management, says: “We were impressed by the functionality offered by Citco’s ÆXIMO technology which is backed by a highly competent IT development team”.
Tages Capital, an independent investment and advisory group that allocates significant assets to alternative investment funds on behalf of institutional clients, also awarded Citco a mandate for administration and custody of two of its hedge fund portfolios.
Richard Silver, Chief Financial Officer of Tages Capital says: ‘We chose Citco for its strong infrastructure, technological excellence and client driven solutions’.
Citco’s Alternative Investor Services group focuses on servicing key fund investor clients such as Fund of Hedge Funds, Pensions, Endowments, Family offices, Insurance companies and other institutional investors. Recent strategic initiatives within the group include the development of the ÆXIMO technology, enhanced risk, and Foreign Exchange service offering for fund investor client base which allows clients to outsource FX hedging cycle, including both execution and calculation, with all the transparency benefits. The FX services are systematically audited on a quarterly basis and execution quality reports are produced by specialist external consultants which provide independent insights in to the effective spreads achieved as well as passing judgment on the effectiveness of Citco’s overall FX trading during the quarter.
William Keunen, global director of Citco Fund Services, says: ‘Citco’s recent decision to exit the sub-custody business for financial institutions was driven by the commoditization of the business and the lack of ancillary services attached to it. We intend to now focus fully on servicing our institutional investor clients with our integrated solution. We are committed to delivering both specialist expertise and state-of-the-art technology. Only by providing both can we continue to give the level of service our clients have come to expect of us’.
Citco remains the preeminent administrator in the alternative investment industry with assets under administration topping USD638bn for single manager funds and USD130bn for fund of funds.
