In terms of the Brexit fallout, Dublin is becoming a happening place now. Do you see it as another option for fund managers that don’t have an international base?
We’ve heard the talk but we haven’t seen much real activity or relocation yet. People still are not clear on what Brexit will mean, but there is no doubt that Dublin offers a credible option for people if that’s what is going to be needed to move from the UK.
It’s close to the UK and has a strong history in fund management and fund operations. It also has a well-educated population and financial industry.
How important is the Boston office?
In line with the growth of our business and the extended global footprint, with the largest part now being in the UK, it makes absolute sense for us to have an office there.
We started marketing heavily in the US around 2007 and I moved there that year, when we opened an office in Boston to facilitate the expansion of the business.
We have five people based there, one of our investment managers and four other sales and services people, so it does enable US clients and consultants to come and visit our offices there, meet our people and talk to our asset management team.
How do you think Trump’s election as US president will impact on your business?
We think it is going to be very positive. From a market perspective, it seems to have been greeted well, with the agenda of reduced regulation and taxes, increased spending on infrastructure and capital products seeming to be order of the day.
It is positive for our business, in particular because our natural resource strategies, which feature a water energy solution and an agri-business fund, are built around increasing infrastructure spend.
To date, that increased spend has been dominated by India, China and the Middle East, whereas it is now being supplemented by the strong North American drive.
On our recent trip to Asia, one of the big positives that came out of our meeting with Amundi was they were looking for a product that could target that extra infrastructure spend, which is what our products can do.
On our other strategy, there’s a sense thet North American equities will continue to perform well. We also have a North American version of our global strategy, which was very popular when we met with Amundi.
For our own business, it’s going to be very positive initially. The other element to Trump’s election, the social side, is more of an unknown because of the division in terms of people you talk to on the ground, whether they are Trump supporters or not.
What’s your sense of Asia as a market you can do business in?
On the institutional side, some of the biggest state plans in the world are in Asia. The situation with those funds is quite different to our experience with European and US funds, as they always carry larger deficits and have big issues over funding that are putting them under significant pressure.
Within the Asian market, you are at a different stage in the cycle of those funds, where they are all significant positive cashflows, meaning they have money to allocate.
The fact we already have investors from some of the largest asset owners in the world, in Europe and the UK, demonstrates we can be used by large funds in Asia.
From an institutional perspective, our trip to Asia was positive in that we now have access through our relationship with Amundi to many of those funds we didn’t had access to before.
On the distribution side, again the timing of our visit chimed with the type of product we have, which includes a combination of our three strategies, so a third with exposure to water, a third on energy solutions and a third on agri-business.
We are very much looking to the future, away from traditional energy plays. We’re about solar, wind energy efficiency stocks. We invest in something that we believe is the most precious natural resource of all: water. This gives us a very strong position in that market to be seen as a distributor with something new aimed at the future of investing as opposed to the past.
Biography
Geoff Blake joined KBI Global Investors in 1994. He worked in various portfolio manager and client servicing roles before being appointed as head of business development in October 2006. He was made a director of KBI Global Investors (North America) in April 2008. He holds the Investment Management Certificate, awarded by the UK Society of Investment Professionals. He was appointed a director of KBI Global Investors in September 2015.
