Overview

Funds Management is concerned with professionally managed investments with the view of making them grow on behalf of wholesale and instituational clients.  The investments are made in a range of financial instruments and reflect differing risk profiles of the investors.

Anton Murray Consulting specialises in recruitment within the Funds Management space.  We focus on assignments across Operations, Middle Office as well as Front Office.  Our clients include global Asset Managers and boutique Hedge Funds as well as Fund Administrators and Custodians.

Positions

• Funds Management Operations
• Funds Management Client Services
• Sales, Marketing & Distribution
• Custodial Operations
• Fund Accounting
• Financial Fund Reporting
• Performance Analysis
• Hedge Fund Trade Support
• Senior Funds Management Operations
• Institutional Trust Services
• Investment Analysts
• Funds Management Graduates

Funds Management 2010 Market Trends

Australia remains one of the largest asset pools is in the world and the largest in the Asia Pacific region, hence the recruitment market within this space will remain stable in 2010. Our clients started gradually strengthening within the funds management world after the Australian year-end in June 2009. The recovery has to date been modest, with limited hiring still coming from the smaller fund managers and boutiques.

As the equity markets in 2010 remain stable we would expect more of the smaller fund managers and boutique investment management firms and hedge funds to start selectively building, or rebuilding, teams. As late as quarter 4 in 2009 we saw small funds letting go of staff, so we would expect the hiring for small fund managers to be modest until the later part of 2010.

Similar to 2009, we would expect more of the recruitment in funds management to be with the larger Investment Managers or the large custodians. The smaller investment managers and hedge funds still haven’t fully recovered from the heavy downturn over 2008 and 2009, and importantly their Funds/Assets Under Management need to get to a certain level to enable growth hiring. We would expect small firms in funds management to start hiring again in late 2010.

Operations, Middle Office and Accounting staff within funds management should find it reasonably easy to gain access to opportunities this year. Although we would expect the bulk of opportunities will be with the larger funds or custodians, rather than small fund managers. Front Office funds management staff within Investment teams will find it easier to make a move, as clients become more comfortable with growth hiring, although we expect to see more of this in late 2010. We still expect most of the hiring to be replacement hiring rather than growth, hence we may find it easier for Operations and Middle Office staff to make moves than Front Office candidates within Funds Management.

Overall, we expect quarter 1, 2010 to remain slow, with quarters 2 and 3 remaining relatively strong within Funds Management.  In 2010 we expect quarter 4 is expected to be reasonably strong with many clients likely to load their recruitment in to the later part of 2010 as the markets have full regained confidence. Generally we find that funds management clients move slower than our Investment Banking clients after a downturn and given this their pickup in recruitment will move slower.