Bahamian based fund administrators have shown “significant interest” in utilising the services of a joint venture established by Derivatives Portfolio Management (DPM) and an Oceanic Bank & Trust subsidiary, which aims to provide these institutions with a full range of back office services that will allow them to reduce costs, increase transparency and focus on clients.
Funds Clearing (Bahamas) which has been established at Bayside Executive Park in a 50/50 joint venture between DPM and Oceanic Fund Services, seeks to attract fund administrators to outsource their back office and middle office functions to it.
Bill Thomson, vice-president ofinvestments at Oceanic Bank & Trust, told the Tribune yesterday: “There’s been a significant interest in it – we’re very pleased with that.
“What we’ve done so far is to contact the mutual fund administrators here and do some pre-marketing, telling them what it’s all about, and have had a good response.”
Mr. Thomson said that with its office in Barbados, Oceanic was interested in exploring whether Funds Clearing (Bahamas) could attract business from international fund administrators, although such moves were still a little way off.
Matt Gibbons and NicolaThompson will be in charge of Funds Clearing (Bahamas) which has its own offices.
In a statement issued yesterday, Robert Aaron, DPM’s chairman and chief executive said Funds Clearing (Bahamas) had been created to allow fund administrators to concentrate on “taking on new business, reducing the business risk, containing their costs and improving service, using our web based platform.”
With investors seekingincreased activity, Funds Clearing (Bahamas) will provide a specialist service enabling Bahamian fund administrators to migrate applications to the Internet, process translational activity electronically, receive daily market to market and daily net asset value calculations.
Mr. Thomson told The Tribune: “The Bahamas is under pressure to compete in the mutual fund marketplace and something like this will be able to help us to do so against world-class competition.”
By Neil Hartnell, The Tribune
