Italian-owned new Dublin fund manager plans to double staff

A new Dublin-based fund manager, Fineco Asset Management, plans to more than double its current 15-strong team in the coming years as it builds on its initial base of €8.6 billion of assets under management.

Speaking to The Irish Times, chief executive Fabio Melisso said Fineco AM, a unit of Italian bank FinecoBank, chose to establish in Ireland because of the "ecosystem" of fund services providers, legal expertise, custodians, "transparent" regulatory regime, access to talent, and the relatively lost cost of operating in Dublin compared with some other European financial hubs.

“At full steam, we expect to have between 30 and 35 colleagues,” said Mr Melisso, who relocated from Munich to Dublin last year, adding that roles would include portfolio management, compliance, distribution and marketing.

Mr Melisso said the firm, based at Dublin’s IFSC, had an “ambitious target” for assets under management, but declined to give specifics.

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Publicly quoted FinecoBank is 35 per cent owned by Milan-based global financial services giant Unicredit, which sold Ireland's largest fund manager, Pioneer Investments, to France's Amundi for €3.5 billion last year, creating Europe's largest fund manager with €1.4 trillion of assets under management.

Mr Melisso said Fineco AM, which was authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland in May, initially started off with €6.7 billion of fund-of-fund assets, based in Luxembourg and previously managed by Pioneer.

Fineco AM launched two further sets of products in August under the structure of Dublin-based investment vehicles known as Irish Collective Asset-management Vehicles (ICAVs), which will be available to FinecoBank’s customer base of over 1.27 million.

The Fineco AM funds would have no performance fees and would compete with more than 6,000 mutual funds from 75 asset managers already on offer to FinecoBank, Mr Melisso said.