What drew you to work for Liontrust, and why did it decide to set up an international business?
Jonathan: Liontrust has a good, stable UK base.
It is nicely profitable and very entrepreneurial in its thinking.
It does not take five years to make a decision.
I have known John Ions, who is chief executive here, for more than 20 years as a close friend.
We are confident that it’s a good base.
Liontrust started off with a team just selling to UK investors.
It is quite a high-risk strategy.
He has gently broadened out the UK offering, with Asia funds and bond funds.
He sees that 60% of the flows for UK investment houses come from outside the UK.
Liontrust was keen to get some products that are attractive to international investors.
By international – to start with, we are talking about Europe and Asia.
But eventually South America, even the US and Australia, with the right sort of product.
James: For us, the attraction is the challenge of building this business, but not entirely from scratch, because clearly there is already an institutional backbone.
We are two individuals who are going to raise money from the areas of the world in which we believe we have an attractive product offering, and where we can pick and choose the type of clients we want to do business with.
A lot of the strategies we are going to be promoting will be capacity-constrained as well.
We are not particularly interested in a huge proliferation of clients.
Because we are a small business, and we have the choice of where we can go, we are going to concentrate on where we feel there are pools of discretionary money, be they from discretionary wealth managers, private banks, family offices or international advisory firms that are spread around the world and that have a presence.
One that we already do business with is The Fry Group.
Talk me through the journey of registering the funds in different jurisdictions, in order to target the right types of clients.
James: The fund range we are promoting, and which we will develop, is our Dublin range.
The office in Luxembourg is a full branch office, but our funds are not domiciled in Luxembourg.
It’s an Irish, Dublin-based, UCITS umbrella structure.
As we are building out that fund range, we are less likely to add feeder structures. It is a shame because feeder structures are extremely useful, but they cannot be sold to certain types of clients in certain jurisdictions.
Fund of fund managers, for example, find it very difficult in many jurisdictions to buy a feeder fund, because the end result is actually a fund of fund of fund.
The Dublin fund range is widely registered in the vast majority of European jurisdictions – the Nordics, Switzerland, France, Spain, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Singapore, too.
We are very cognisant of the opportunity set in South America and particularly Chile, for UCITS funds.
The funds are not yet registered there, but that is something we are going to look at quite closely, probably in the latter half of this year.
It is not as though we have to create this infrastructure from scratch.
The umbrella structure is there.
There will be the addition of sub-funds, of strategies we are going to bring on and new teams we are in the process
