Treasury Group to go global macro with latest boutique

Treasury Group’s new boutique, foreshadowed last month, is a global macro strategy firm, to be based in Sydney and focused on investing Pan Asia.

Executive director David Cooper, who hands over his chief executive reins to Mark Burgess from tomorrow, is hopeful the new firm will be up and running by the end of the year. It will have, initially, a four-person investment team and will launch Cayman Islands funds for an expected initial client base of US investors. Cooper announced last week that Mark Burgess, an Australian fund manager who has been working in Europe for the past 10 years, would take up the chief executive job at Treasury Group from October 1. This was to allow Cooper more time to develop deals with prospective new managers. Burgess was most recently chief executive of Credit Suisse Asset Management in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Prior to that he worked for American Express Asset Management overseas and before that Colonial First State in Australia and the UK. He said that while Australia had always been innovative in funds management, he hoped he could bring some new experience based on the scale and depth of markets available in Europe which allowed for a greater mix of investment strategies. Treasury Group has become more of an international company in the past few years with the success of Treasury Asia, which has European clients, and infrastructure group RARE, which has a Candian joint venture. The company has two Dublin funds and will create a third for its Global Value Investors boutique, which currently has only retail funds sourced from Australia. “We have always looked to diversify by type of business and type of client,” Cooper said.