Queen Street Partners, the emerging manager research and fund-of-funds firm owned by Macquarie Bank, has appointed a former GMO Australia boss as its first independent director.

Paul Chadwick, who had been chief executive of GMO until June, joins founder Steven Vaughan and two Macquarie executives on the board in a non-executive role. Vaughan, who had run his own consulting firm since the early 1990s, launched the new Macquarie subsidiary as a separate business unit in September last year with its first fund currently looking to raise $200 million. Vaughan said yesterday that Chadwick had extensive experience in building a successful firm with employee ownership at GMO. The emerging manager fund will look to hire six to eight Australian equities managers with a scheduled launch next January. Vaughan said the fund would be capped at $1.5 billion. “We have done a lot of work on how emerging managers perform while they are small – up to several hundred million (dollars in FUM) – and the return is substantially greater than the institutions and bigger boutiques … It’s not just a few basis points it’s hundreds of basis points,” he said. Vaughan’s consultancy specialised in researching employee-owned firms. Queen Street Partners currently has three full-time researchers, one of whom is currently based in Sydney but is expected to relocate to Melbourne in the new year.