Grant Samuel Funds Management (GSFM) has announced plans to take one of its Australia-based managers to Canada in a move that would see the start of distribution of Munro Partners’ products in the Canadian market in the 2018 calendar year.
The move would be facilitated through GSFM’s partnership with one of the largest Canadian independent fund companies, CI Financial, which is currently a major shareholder of GSFM, owning 80 per cent of the firm.
GSFM’s chief executive, Damian McIntyre, said the partnership was aimed from the beginning at both equally exporting Australian expertise to America and bringing Canadian fund managers to the domestic marketplace.
“When we partnered with CI the whole hope was not only we will bring Canadian managers into Australia but equally, where the product is right, we will take Australian managers to Canada – and this is the first example how it works,” McIntyre said.
He added that the Canadian retail market was not significantly different from the Australian market in terms of barriers to entry.
“If you think about Australia, it’s the fourth largest pension market in the world, so the landscape is extremely competitive here and Canada is the fifth largest pension market, so equally the competition is fierce.”
On a positive note, the legislative landscape in Canada, which was believed to have an “incredibly rigorous” disclosure regime for fund managers, was expected to see some changes in the second half of the year, which was expected to make it easier for the industry to offer alternative investments to retail investors.
The Munro Global Growth Fund returned 21.84 per cent in the year to date, according to FE Analytics.
GSFM first entered a partnership with Munro, a Melbourne-based global growth manager led by Nick Griffin, 13 months ago. The past year was described by McIntyre as “spectacular” for the Munro fund, which was added to all major platforms and currently has $250 million in funds under management.
He said: “I’d like to see them progressing in an institutional sense and that will be the project for us this year, to begin our dialogue with the institutional community, but certainly as far as the retail strategy is concerned, everything is going ahead of where we thought we would be and it’s been a great success.”
