What does your role as head of client relationship management involve?
My role is predominantly focused on growing the SANNE brand across the Americas. In addition to this, I support the business by overseeing all existing and new growth opportunities. That growth being both organic and in-organic enhances product awareness from all of our global capabilities to the US and then also to, not just the market, but existing clients, which means cross and up selling as well.
How will your previous roles help you at SANNE?
I’ve worked across various aspects of the front office, middle office and back office. I’ve interfaced on the fund manager side, and I have met everyone from the people executing investments to the chief compliance officers, the CFO and COO’s and also the technology side.
This has helped me to understand the holistic investment process and full life cycle of a fund and a fund manager. I also worked at Orangefield, building the brand in the US as well as building out the private equity market.
I’m excited. SANNE have a really great team and an excellent product and robust service offering.
What many people don’t realise is that we have an office of 90 people in New York, which used to be Morgan Stanley’s private equities stock office. In terms of impact, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to quickly be impactful in the market, just with a little branding. It seems to be going well so far.
How has SANNE expanded its offering in the Americas so far?
SANNE acquired a group called FLSV Fund Administration Services LLC, which was formally headed by Jeffrey Hahn, who previously served at Morgan Stanley. All of our product capabilities align with our global model. We service closed-ended funds across hybrid private equity, real estate, private debt and capital markets. We have already added corporate services as something that we are doing out of the US.
The best thing about our global offering is that we can service clients from whatever jurisdiction they need. Given all of our capabilities, if someone needs a fund manager, or a client needs us to provide a service in the US that we already do in a different jurisdiction, it’s fairly easy to mirror that.
We know we can offer our US clients the outsourced administration services. So now if someone wants to go and market in Europe, we can help them comply by providing them with the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) compliant depositary services and fund and corporate administration services.
These can be serviced from within Europe, the Middle East and Africa region as well, which is an added benefit.
What challenges does the asset servicing industry face in 2018?
One of the challenges for private funds and private equity is that people are looking for investment. They have capital and they’re solely in real estate, for example.
Right now the big issue is tax. The impact of the new tax regime, what’s going to happen and how will it affect funds. The pressing question is: how does that affect investors?
I joined SANNE in January and I’m really excited to be here and I’m extremely impressed thus far with the calibre of professional people we have across our global business. And we have a lot of experienced and skilled employees across all levels and areas who take service excellent very seriously.
I’ve been very impressed across all divisions of the group and firmly believe that because we have such a dynamic young group of business leaders who are driven to achieve and execute all of our business plans.
AIFMD is an EU directive that places hedge funds, private equity and other alternative investment firms into a regulated framework. How has it affected SANNE since its first implementation back in 2011?
Initially, I thought people reacted to AIFMD with panic. And then after it stuck around and people started to understand it, they understood how people and businesses could comply.
Europe is a huge market and a lot of investments comes out of there, so being able to help our US clients in that regard was a challenge.
We’ve expanded our offering in order to support our clients with their needs on AIFMD. Our office in Luxembourg currently has more than 100 people in it, so we have scaled and robust capabilities and operations there.
In addition, in Dublin (another key European financial jurisdiction of choice for US clients) our business operations have been authorised as a fund administrator by the Central Bank of Ireland in Q3 2017–this further expands our capabilities there too.
Has AIFMD had a negative effect on the industry? And have you seen it bring any opportunities?
It’s easier to go and face the unknown than avoid it. There were a lot of US managers who were advised properly.
And when the directive first came out, it wasn’t possible initially to outsource your management company, so the cost involved with setting up a management company in Europe and doing everything you need to comply for passport were tremendous.
The service industry, has been able to solve those problems, and actually offer an efficient and effective solution.
