INDOS Financial, an independent UK depository, has reached over $20 billion in assets under depository from around 100 alternative investment funds.
The milestone represents a growth in business of 37% year-on-year in the number of funds it services, and a 54% increase in assets under depository since 2016.
Bill Prew, CEO of INDOS, explained that fund managers are increasingly recognising the value of appointing an independent depository, as opposed to one affiliated with a fund administrator.
“In many cases depositary services are viewed as a tick-box subset of fund administration but this model inevitably results in conflicts of interest given that one of the key roles of a depositary is to oversee the output of the administrative function and flag up problems,” said Prew.
“INDOS is responsible for reviewing each NAV calculation and providing the fund manager and the Board with regular, tailored reports. By contrast many managers who transfer their depositary requirements to us say they had little active engagement with their (former) depositary and were very rarely notified of issues whether at their affiliated administration business or otherwise.”
Originally founded to provide ‘depo-lite’ services to hedge funds under AIFMD (Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive) came into force, INDOS has now broadened its range of services to include private equity and real estate funds, of which 27 are now clients.
Since May 2017, the firm has evolved further to offer full depositary services to UK-unauthorised funds such as investment trusts.