Hedge Fund Awards 2016
Best Fund Management Boutique & Best Emerging Market Focused Fund: Prodigy Asia & Emerging Markets Fund
Independent UCITS Platform
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The Independent UCITS Platform is a Luxembourg based fund infrastructure created to address the needs of specialist managers/entrepreneurs who wish to retain flexibility, freedom and independence when they establish their own UCITS funds.
Company: Independent UCITS Platform Name: Hugh Hunter Email: hugh.hunter@prodigycapital.net Web Address: www.independentucits.com Address: Suite 3A, 17-20 Ironmonger Lane, London, EC2V 8EP United Kingdom Telephone: 020 7495 9605
The Platform is designed to make it quick, easy and cost effective to set up a UCITS fund, without undergoing the time and expense of establishing and maintaining a new SICAV vehicle. The structure is particularly suitable for managers wishing to re-engineer an existing offshore fund or to replicate an offshore strategy in a UCITS fund. Key benefits They manage and provide assistance in the take-on process, ensuring that the launch of new funds is quick and easy. • Their extensive experience of fund launches and complex transactions (such as re-domiciliation and cross-border mergers of UCITS) simplifies the daunting task of adapting existing strategies to the UCITS framework; • Fund costs are tightly controlled, to ensure the Total Expense Ratio (“TER”) of a fund with assets of €15m is below the crucial level of 1% ex-management fees. The Platform makes no claim on management, performance or distribution fees, so managers keep the revenue they earn; • Investment managers have control over branding, distribution and management of their own funds*. The underlying administrative and legal structure is designed to be invisible so each fund on the Platform is effectively fully independent and appears to investors as a stand-alone product; • Funds on the Platform benefit from world class service providers, including Citi which acts as the custodian and fund administrator. The principals at Andbank were pioneers in the creation of platform structures in Luxembourg in the late 1990s; • The Platform is also independent of distributors, marketing firms, large asset management companies and investment banks. Therefore, managers can choose who will distribute their funds and which counterparties will execute their trades. Platform-level arrangements have been established for execution, derivative transactions and, critically, distribution. There is no need for managers to spend valuable time “reinventing the wheel”; • Independent UCITS has quickly become a leading provider of platform services in Luxembourg since it was established in September 2012. The Platform has achieved a critical mass of five funds and assets over US$120m. A further five new funds will be launched in 1H 2014 and there is a pipeline of new funds to be launched later in the year. Hugh Hunter (Founder) Hugh Hunter, CFA graduated from Plymouth Polytechnic in 1981. His career has involved quantitative analysis and emerging market investment management at Baring Asset Management, LGT and WestLB, before being appointed as CEO of Blackfriars Asset Management. In 2011 Hugh was appointed CEO of Prodigy Capital Partners LLP and has responsibility for the Independent UCITS Platform. Hugh has been a CFA Charterholder since 1993.
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