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(pictured: Pete Cherecwich) Northern Trust is to open a Sydney office for asset servicing following its purchase of London-based institutional broker Aviate Global. The expansion follows a period of strong new-business growth in Australia in the provision of both back and middle-office solutions. Pete Cherecwich, Northern’s Chicago-based head of global fund services, said in Sydney last…

(pictured: David Travers) RBC Investor & Treasury Services, the only master custodian in Australia which specialises in working for fund managers, has celebrated 15 years of operations here with its reappointment by Perpetual after a review. The deal caps off a good period for RBC, which acquired Perpetual’s fund services business and launched itself in Australia…

(pictured: Graham Harman) Australia, New Zealand and India represent relative bright spots in the Asia Pacific region according to the latest quarterly global markets outlook from Russell Investments. While the firm is still predicting a soft landing for China, it says: “if there is a year when sceptics will be proven correct, this is it”. The…

by Greg Bright The liquidator to van Eyk Research appears to have done a good-enough job to date, for a healthy fee of course, but creditors will only get some money if various legal actions are successful, according to the latest report from Pitcher Partners. The demise of van Eyk Research (the dominant advisory and…

(pictured: Grant Hassell) AMP Capital has dropped the minimum investment for direct access to its range of 24 funds from NZ$100,000 to NZ$2,000 as it tests out demand in the non-advised retail market in New Zealand. The manager is capitalising on its SMSF capabilities built up in Australia for the new marketing initiative. Grant Hassell, AMP…

by Alice Breheny* (pictured) If you had to identify 26 trends that real estate investors need to bear in mind for Tomorrow’s World – each matched with a different letter of the alphabet – what would you see? A resultant theme is that investors should be thinking differently. As an institutional property investor we want…

(pictured: Simon Tyler) The latest custody tender battle – that for the assets of the Crown Financial Institution (CFI) in New Zealand – has ended in victory for the incumbent, JP Morgan. The assets under administration total $NZ6 billion ($A5.37 billion). Following a tender process launched in the middle of last year, JP Morgan was reappointed…

(pictured: David Braga) The $8 billion boutique equities manager Northcape Capital has switched securities servicing partners from RBC Capital to BNP Paribas as the manager looks to expand globally. The new arrangement includes middle-office services. Northcape, which was established in 2005 and which ventured into emerging market equities in 2008, specialises in concentrated portfolios for institutional…

(pictured: Wyatt Roy) by Trevor Dixon* Tech start-ups may have the capacity to create solutions but in many cases lack the distribution and reach to identify the problems crying out for those solutions, according to Wyatt Roy, the Federal Government’s assistant minister for innovation. Roy spoke at the second ‘TechTank’ roundtable organised by law firm MinterEllison…

(pictured: Tim Ridley) Cbus has introduced an options program through QIC with the dual goal of managing risk better and providing a new capability to develop member retirement products. Such programs are likely to become increasingly popular. Frontier Advisors has been publicly recommending such a program for the past couple of years, usually preferring to use…

(pictured: Barry McInerney) BMO Global Asset Management has published its annual five-year outlook for markets, including an analysis of three key “actionable” investment scenarios. The most likely tips a broadening of economic growth from the US to Europe and Japan. BMO GAM has placed a 60 per cent chance on the benign view which envisages…

Henderson Global Investors has gone live with Milestone Group’s ‘pControl Fund Oversight’ system across its range of mutual funds and investment trusts. The installation has also allowed a consolidation of admin services by the big manager. According to Milestone, the solution has enabled Henderson to automate the collection of fund valuation data and the subsequent…