Business & Philosophy

Business

Custom House's fund manager or fund promoter clients are, for the most part, independent money managers, fund of fund managers and family offices, as well as banks and institutions.  Custom House provides clients with practical solutions to such problems as valuations for daily dealing hedge funds and pricing hard to value OTC and other illiquid assets.

Custom House specialise in alternative investment funds and, indeed describes itself as "The Specialist Fund Specialist".  As such, Custom House does not generally act for traditional or 'vanilla' funds, rather concentrating on the ubiquitous alternative investment and hedge funds, which include many varied investment strategies, such as, inter alia: long-short equity, equity-option, merger and convertible arbitrage, high yield bonds, emerging markets, currencies, futures and derivatives, as well as funds of funds and other multi-advisor procedures, including managed accounts and managed account platforms.

The full 24/5 "round the world", "round the clock" administration service covers all aspects of day to day operations, including, inter alia, maintaining both a fund's financial and statutory books and records, carrying out pricing and valuations, calculating the NAV and handling all subscriptions and redemptions, as well as overseeing payment of a fund's expenses, carrying out Anti-Money Laundering (AML) due diligence checks and liaising with the fund's auditor.

Custom House uses PFS-PAXUS ("PAXUS") fully integrated fund administration system, which incorporates the automatic calculation of fees, including equalisation.  PAXUS, which eliminates the "error-zones" inherent in multiple modular component administration systems, is the core contributor to Custom House's efficiency and enables Custom House to currently produce over 110 daily dealing NAVs for a broad range of funds and sub-funds.  Custom House is able to do this because of its ability to "roll" the fund's books from one regional office to the next, taking advantage of the same single integrated system, which serves all offices and the time differences between those offices.  We believe Custom House is unique in this regard.

Reporting is effected through CHARIOT, Custom House's secure password protected web-reporting platform for managers and investors. [CHARIOT]

Philosophy

As at the 30th of September 2009, CHFGS administered over 540 funds and sub-funds for more than 200 investment management clients with total assets under administration of circa US$35 billion and funds ranging in size from start-up funds, with a few million US Dollars at launch, to large established funds with several billion US Dollars.  This reflects Custom House's philosophy to working, not only with institutions, but also with emerging or newly independent money managers, whose customised funds, inevitably, start out quite small.  Indeed, recently Custom House won the 2009 HFMWeek (European) Service Providers award as The Best Small Hedge Fund Administrator and was highly commended in the HFMWeek (US) Service Provider Awards as a Small (US) Hedge Fund Administrator.  The Custom House philosophy and objective is that Custom House should grow with those managers and their funds, thus demonstrating its long-term commitment to its clients.  Notwithstanding that, as at the end of September 2009, Custom House acted as administrator to several funds in excess of US$1 billion, further demonstrating that Custom House has grown to an institutionally acceptable size.

Personal and Innovative Service

Custom House prides itself on a personal and yet innovative service:

In the context of the personal service, every effort is made to tailor the structure of the fund to meet the Client's objective, taking into account, inter alia, such things as the investment strategy, the targeted investors, the proposed geographical market and custodial security, whilst considering both cost and operating efficiency.

In the context of innovation, Custom House has introduced a number of original and, in some cases, ground-breaking concepts, including, inter alia, the Red Herring Option, the CHARIOT platform and the Cash Management Programme, utilising the "CMP Trust Account", which benefits all funds which carry substantial cash balances. Furthermore, Custom House was instrumental in obtaining Irish Stock Exchange approval for the CMP Trust Account, as an acceptable alternative to traditional custodial arrangements. Custom House also introduced the concept of "Opaque Transparency", in the context of a Risk Analysis service. See Risk Monitoring.

Global Footprint

Prior to the merger of Equity Trust's fund services business into Custom House, Custom House had representative offices in Singapore and Chicago.  Following the merger, Custom House now has offices, in addition to Dublin, Chicago and Singapore, in Malta, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Guernsey.  The Custom House week effectively starts at midnight Sunday GMT, when CHS opens on their Monday morning and closes at midnight Friday GMT, when CHC goes home at the end of their working week.  This gives Custom House a truly global footprint with the ability to offer a 24/5 service for clients needing the facility.