Export opportunities for financial services in 2007
Mick O'Brien
The exporting of financial services is set to play a more prominent role for the Australian market in 2007, according to a senior executive at a leading financial services company.
Challenger Financial Services Group chief executive funds management Rob Adams said: “In many ways Australia is at the cutting edge of financial services product development and intermediation and then the use of technology in the provision of those products. So there are lessons we can teach other parts of the world that’s for sure.”
But Adams feels taking advantage of Australia’s advanced standing in the global financial services sector is not the only reason the exporting of these products is an exercise worth exploring.
“There are also things that we manufacture from a financial services perspective that we need to be able to export in order to give our shareholders high quality scalable growth and to balance our books as well,” he said.
“So certainly at Challenger one of our key themes for 2007 is determining how we can sensibly export in a high quality manner to the right sort of clients all around the world and we think there’s a real opportunity for our business and other businesses like ours to do just that,” Adams added.
Invesco chief executive Mick O’Brien reiterated Adams’ thoughts about the new direction the industry may take in the coming year.
“The Australian superannuation industry and funds management industry generally is very sophisticated in terms of the way it goes about setting investment strategies, and the way it goes about using alternative types of investments,” O’Brien said.
“Just in the last 18 months we’ve had a couple of examples where the group has used our Australian business almost as a testing ground for new product development and new product design particularly in the use of global assets because with the liquidity flow of superannuation money in Australia more and more and more assets are going to have to be invested in offshore types of products,” he explained.
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