How did Atlantic Fund Services begin?
The history of Atlantic Fund Services as a full service provider began with the founding of Forum Financial Group in 1986 by John Keffer. The company became at that time the largest, privately owned fund service provider in the US, with a major offshore operation in Bermuda.
In 1995, we launched Forum’s European branch in Warsaw, which has since developed into one of the largest fund administration and transfer agents in Europe, providing services in Poland, Luxembourg and several other European countries. Citigroup acquired Forum in 2003, integrating its global fund services business.
Starting in 2007, we re-acquired a significant portion of Citigroup’s interests in Forum (US) and established Atlantic’s US operations, augmenting those operations in 2009 by acquiring Citigroup’s (formerly Forum’s) Warsaw affiliate.
These two acquisitions, now unified as Atlantic Fund Services, represent the continuation into the present of the corporate culture first defined in the original Forum Financial Group. Atlantic’s culture and work ethic is maintained by many of the same individuals who were part of the original Forum, working together again to deliver the same high quality service as they have done over the years.
What does Atlantic Fund Services aim to do for clients as their third party fund administrator?
We are one the largest independent fund administrators providing services to a significant number of clients in several European countries and the US. Our goal is to provide high-quality, high-touch, highly customised services to clients of different sizes, be it a small closed-end fund or a large one-million plus member pension fund. We offer a one-stop service spanning transfer agency, fund accounting, administration, anti-money laundering/know your customer, distribution, reporting, call centre, and so on.
In Europe, we use our proprietary technology, which offers us a great deal of flexibility in terms of timelines and costs for our clients. We have a large technology development team in Poland together with our centre of excellence, supporting a number of different jurisdictions. Increasingly, we find that clients require support in multiple countries, which we can cater to based on our technology, expertise and supported languages.
We are also very active in the area of distribution support for our clients. We work with about 80 distributors in Europe, providing our own technology for capturing trades and delivering data. Our systems are internet-based and we can receive and deliver data from and to any point in the globe. We are very proud that despite our large-scale business supporting hundreds of funds and more than 1.6 million accounts, we maintain a culture that focuses on our clients and their ultimate satisfaction.
What sort of funds do you cater for?
We are currently accommodating a large variety of fund types originating from several jurisdictions, such as Luxembourg, Poland, the US and Liechtenstein. In Europe, we provide services for daily-valued UCITS, specialised investment funds, pension funds, insurance unit-linked products, real estate and private equity funds, as well as alternative products. In the US, we support mutual funds, collective trusts, alternative investments, exchange-traded funds, hedge funds and umbrella series funds.
Is there a particular fund type in Europe that is gaining traction this year as an investment vehicle, and what would you attribute this to?
After a decrease in the number of fund launches over the last several years, we have noticed that a larger number of alternative funds are being launched. The implementation of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) should help to rebuild the reputation of such products. I don’t mean derivatives, but rather the alternative funds investing in land or farms, and the funds that have found a niche with underlying investments as exotic as horses, life-settlement products, reverse mortgages or rights to football players.
The structures that can gain an extra attraction this year might be the re-domiciled funds from offshore locations. Luxembourg, for instance, implemented a new partnership regime last year to accommodate new types of fund managers. We are also expecting an increase in pension funds that can be domiciled in Luxembourg (.e.g, pooling), and insurance products.
What are your core fund administration solutions and how capable are they of supporting your expansion ambitions?
Right now, we are experiencing very fast growth in several markets. In addition to supporting markets in Luxembourg and Poland, we entered the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria this year, and we have plans to enter additional markets very soon. Such a fast pace of international expansion is supported by our flexible yet robust fund administration solutions.
Our main transfer agency platform, GTAS, is capable of supporting multiple products in multiple jurisdictions, and can be quickly deployed to new markets. Our front-end system, called Fund Investor, can support international investors for trading over the internet or delivering contract notes and statements in our own application or, as frequently used by our clients, white-label solutions in specific layouts, languages, and so on.
Another leading solution is our distribution-support system, Fund Agent. The system is used by a large number of distributors in Europe, enabling to open investment accounts and place trades for their clients. The data is refreshed daily, so the distributor and his client has the most up-to-date information at their reach.
We also offer to our international client an anti-money laundering solution called Fund AML. The online system enables users to check any new investor against a comprehensive set of blacklists, and gives flexibility to compliance officers in determining their own risk profiles.
How are European funds and managers coping with AIFMD, and what role is technology playing?
The implementation of AIFMD can be a big opportunity for asset managers, but also brings with it challenges from the risk perspective. From the fund administration perspective, we have noticed several requests from clients, who would like to receive more and more data in order to control the identified risks. Fortunately, due to our technology, we can provide such information pretty quickly and are able to assist risk committees with their duties. Nevertheless, there will be an increasing demand on risk management software in the future.
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