Nick, what growth have you seen in your SICAV offering?
Our SICAV in 2010 was the 43rd largest SICAV available out of Luxembourg. We measure ourselves against other cross-border SICAV families, so funds that are registered in three or more countries. We don’t measure ourselves against individual mutual funds because they have a different target market.
Today, we have the 18th largest SICAV. We have had significant growth over the past five years as we’ve expanded our business servicing advisers at the local level, helping them to position products, understand how we manage money and how we can advise them on portfolio construction, on the macro environment.
This is so that when they look at their buy list from the head office and they see a Goldman Sachs Asset Management fund on there, they know how to position it and what role it plays in a client portfolio.
We’re now at $1.2trn assets under supervision. Our SICAV, which services clients in Latin America, EMEA and Asia, is just over $50bn.
Can you explain exactly your role in building these SICAV assets?
My role is third-party distribution, which, to us, means mutual fund distribution and sub-advisory. The geographic remit is offshore sales into Latin America, EMEA, Asia ex Japan, inclusive of Australia. So, essentially non-US distribution ex Japan.
Our typical clients are insurance companies, banks, private banks and retail distributors.
I have been responsible for EMEA since 2008, having joined Goldman Sachs in 2000, and I took on the wider international role in 2013.
The crucial point in our history was in 2010. Until then, we were 38 people. Our focus was in two areas, one was sub-advisory, outsourcing of other people’s funds, by insurance companies, banks and asset managers. Second, doing mutual fund distribution through organisations, which, be they retail or private bank, was head-office prescriptive. The client adviser had to follow the model, or was using discretionary products that were manufactured at the head office level.
From our perspective, our sales functions from a third-party distribution standpoint were always at the head office level, regardless of whether it was sub-advisory or distribution of mutual funds.
In 2010, we looked at the business and thought we were not participating in the vast majority of the mutual fund market because we didn’t have the ability to serve this at the local level. As a result, we moved to a team of 80 people to be able to participate with the big mutual fund distributors.
What is the scale of importance of each of those regions?
We made the investment into Europe first, in 2010, and during the past two years we have been investing in Asia and the UK.
In the Middle East, we have started over the past 18 months and we have a third-party distribution business in Australia, which has been established for many years but changed its focus in the past two years.
We have offices with sales people in Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden and the UK.
From a Latin American perspective, the Brazilian offshore business is covered from the US because we have Portuguese speakers based there. The Spanish-speaking business in Latin American is covered by our Iberian team, who pay frequent visits to Miami, and onwards.
We have an office in every country where we do business on the ground, with the exception of Latin America.
