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Estera, a provider of funds, corporate and trust services, has moved to its new, state of the art offices in Guernsey. It will see the firm’s fund administration, accounting and reporting services, as well as their corporate and trust services offered from one high-specification office.
Estera acquired Heritage Financial Services Group and Morgan Sharpe in 2017 making it one of the island’s largest administrators. The move to the 17,600 sq ft offices at Trafalgar Court in St Peter Port, brings together the 100 members of the Guernsey team under one roof.
Farah Ballands, Chief Executive Officer at Estera, says:
Willis Towers Watson has appointed a number of asset management experts in its FINEX Financial Institutions practice enhancing its offering to a core part of its client portfolio. The appointments are part of the company’s continued strategy to build the leading financial institutions business globally.
Henry Keville, among others, will provide bespoke management liability product solutions and programmes for the asset management sector as part of a strengthened team of specialists. Keville – who started his career at Marsh and was instrumental in establishing the asset management portfolios at both Howden and Lockton – has 20 years of experience serving the
Mosaic Smart Data, a real-time capital markets data analytics company, has completed an USD9 million investment round to support its rapid product development and global expansion.
The round was co-led by CommerzVentures and Octopus Ventures and includes JP Morgan – an existing investor and client.
Daily trading activity in the capital markets generates vast quantities of raw transaction and pricing data. Institutions are increasingly looking to extract the value from this, largely untapped, data asset. Annual spending on data analytics and market data has now grown to over USD30.5 billion a year. Being able to refine this raw data
Fidante Partners, an international investment management business, has appointed of Nora O’Mahony as Head of Product in its London office.
O’Mahony joins Fidante from Pacific Asset Management where she developed and launched a bespoke range of funds in partnership with a global IFA. She has a long track record in product strategy and development having spent the prior 15 years at GAM, latterly as the Global Head of Product.
During her tenure at GAM, O’Mahony was responsible for the Product Development, Product Management and Market Research teams, overseeing AUM growth to over USD50 billion in the specialist fund range.
Hedge fund managers ended March 2019 up 0.77 per cent on an equal-weighted basis, and 0.45 per cent on an asset-weighted basis. Roughly 78.0 per cent of the hedge fund managers tracked by Eurekahedge recorded positive returns over the first quarter of the year.
Fund managers focusing on Asia topped the chart with their 5.66 per cent year-to-date returns. Across strategies, long/short equities mandate outperformed their peers in the first quarter.
Hedge fund closure activities dwindled during the first quarter of 2019, with 79 liquidations recorded thus far, compared to 155 recorded in 2018 Q1.
Institutional Advisory Services Group (IASG), an independent advisory firm specialising in alternative investments for institutional and high net worth investors, has launched a new company – IASG Fund Services (IASG-FS).
Incorporated in 2019, IASG-FS will offer fund services to investment managers. This new company, majority owned by the Jonkheer family, has partnered with a known operator in the fund administration business. Through this operator’s innovative SaaS platform, Seamless Solutions, IASG-FS will sell fund administration services and products to managers. These services include but are not limited to back-office, shadow accounting, investor services, cash management, cloud technology, document storage and cybersecurity.
Catena Technologies has extended its collaboration with UnaVista, part of London Stock Exchange Group, to help firms prepare and comply with Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) transaction reporting.
Catena has extended its membership of UnaVista’s Partner Programme to include SFTR. This will now enable its customers to automate trade reporting submission and post-submission reconciliation for SFTR, in addition to EMIR and MiFID II. Catena’s TRACE Reporting is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that manages a wide range of functional requirements for trade reporting, including cross-asset coverage, valuation and collateral reporting, reconciliation, and multi-jurisdiction support. Catena’s award-winning reporting solution works together with
J Stern & Co, a London and Zurich-based Private Investment Office, has launched its successful World Stars Global Equity strategy in a Luxembourg UCITS fund.
The World Stars Global Equity Fund has been launched following investor demand for a more accessible way of investing in the World Stars Global Equity strategy. The Fund has been made available in a Luxembourg UCITS IV format, using the Alpha UCITS SICAV, the leading Luxembourg UCITS platform.
The World Stars Global Equity strategy, which is unconstrained and does not track a benchmark, invests in a concentrated selection of 20-30 shares in leading global companies with enduring competitive advantages and a
Total net assets of UCITS and AIFs increased by 1.7 per cent to EUR16,030 billion in February, according to The European Fund and Asset Management Association’s (EFAMA) latest Investment Fund Industry Fact Sheet.
Bernard Delbecque, Senior Director for Economics and Research at EFAMA. says: “Net total assets of UCITS and AIFs crossed again the 16 trillion-euro mark in February, following the robust recovery in world capital markets since the beginning of the year.”
Net sales of UCITS and AIFs totalled EUR13 billion, down from EUR28 billion in January, with UCITS registering net inflows of EUR6 billion, down from EUR23 billion in January. Long-term
Brooks Macdonald Group’s Discretionary Funds under Management (FUM) for the third quarter ended 31 March 2019 totalled GBP12.8 billion, an increase of 7.9 per cent over the quarter (31 December 2018: GBP11.9 billion).
By comparison, the MSCI WMA Balanced Index increased by 6.9 per cent over the period.
The increase was driven by net new business of GBP166 million (+1.4 per cent) and investment performance of GBP773 million (+6.5 per cent).
UK Investment Management added net flows of GBP152 million (+1.5 per cent) and performance gains of GBP742 million (+7.2 per cent), while international had positive net new business of
