The performance of the funds under Aberdeen has been good and all major mandates have been retained. Deutsche still has $18 billion under management in Australian-sourced assets and is in the process of rolling out more products from a vast array of international alternatives. Deutsche has a thematic global equities strategy which is benchmark unaware and a global fixed interest strategy which will be rolled out in Australia later this year.

It also has a quant platform which Larsen says he want to provide in Australia. In the alternatives space, he says, Deutsche can rightly claim to be experts in property securities, direct property and infrastructure. Increasingly it will be developing its private equity capabilities through the ownership of Aldus in the US. “It was a bold decision,” he says. “But we had one of our best-ever years last year because we focused on what we are good at.”

When a firm has a big range of strategies and products, the challenge from the manager’s perspective is to offer only what’s appropriate for the market. These days, when funds are prepared to look at almost anything which has the potential to provide alpha, that is not an easy task. The firm’s global agribusiness product is currently popular, as you might expect, but even things such as a Japanese opportunistic property fund are attracting interest, Larsen says.

To facilitate the process Deutsche has developed a team of “investment specialists”. These are people who have managed money in the past and now act as an intermediary between the portfolio managers and the clients. The regional specialist is Australian Bill Barbour, who recently relocated from Sydney to Singapore. “This is more of an educative role than a sales role,” Larsen says. “It’s an area where we want to plough more resources.”

As super funds spend more effort retaining members into their retirement where possible, structured products will play an increasing role. Traditionally provided by investment banks through closed-end funds, often with very high fees attached, Deutsche is looking to focus on “platform friendly” structured products which are open-ended and with good liquidity. “We built the first platform-friendly capital guaranteed open-ended fund for Navigator, using the van Eyk portfolio and we also have a product for NAB Capital Markets,” Larsen says.

“We’re moving more into that space… We can bring a fiduciary level of care. We make money out of annual fees, so we need to provide ongoing service. We want to bring that traditional asset management fiduciary level of care to the structured products area.” While admitting the alternatives pay higher fees, Larsen believes that this is not an issue with clients when the product is well differentiated.