Bennelong Funds Management chief executive, John Burke, has shared the firm’s priorities for 2025 including offering its responsible entity (RE) service to third parties.
Burke joined the active fund manager as chief executive in 2023 from Fidante, where he was the global head, having previously set up Challenger Investment Solutions.
One of the priorities this year is to offer an RE service to other investment managers to ease their burden when launching funds.
As an RE or trustee, this means Bennelong assumes full oversight, fiduciary and compliance responsibilities, including interacting with ASIC, and offers assistance with fund setup. This reduces the time and cost for fund managers and they benefit from Bennelong’s established relationships and service provider agreements.
Speaking to Money Management, Burke said: “For the first time, we will be introducing responsible entity and trustee services and offering these to third parties. We see an opportunity to bring that service to market.
“We have the existing infrastructure so this will be a good way to keep abreast of our clients, offer them a new level of service and be relevant to the client base. Firms tend to stay with their responsible entity for a long time so this will help us diversify our income streams.
“We won’t be distributing products, maybe this is something we could do in the future, but we do want it to be a standalone business for new firms or companies who want to set up a fund in Australia but aren’t a responsible entity.”
The second priority for Burke is to broaden the range of funds it offers itself for the wholesale market.
“Wholesale is our strength – we do have superannuation clients but they are only a small part – the majority of our assets are held in wholesale and these [wholesale] clients want differentiated products.
“We are active managers and that suits the financial adviser market. They want to be able to demonstrate they can deliver alpha for their clients. They do like passive funds, but we don’t worry about that – there is room for both types of funds in portfolios.”
He previously shared with Money Management that the two areas the firm is looking to expand into are multisector fixed income and global equities.
“We don’t have much fixed income. The only product is an insurance-linked security product which we distribute through Leadenhall, so we want to look at that more, and multi-asset fixed income would be important there as interest rates are far higher than before.
“Multisector fixed income is definitely of interest for us,” he said. “Bonds will be higher for longer, so you need a manager who has experience in working in that type of interest rate environment, who can navigate that.”
