Macquarie amalgamates agribusiness divisions
Macquarie has rolled its two agriculture businesses into one new business as part of a strategy to provide scale to expand its operations overseas.
The new business, Macquarie Agricultural Funds Management, comprises Macquarie’s Pastoral Fund business and its forestry and almond managed investment schemes (MISs) business.
The wholesale Pastoral Fund, which was launched in May last year, was previously part of Macquarie banking and financial services group while the longstanding retail MIS projects were part of the funds management group.
Together, the two groups will bring the size of the new division to 45 staff members, who will collectively manage about 105,000 hectares in Australia across various agricultural sectors.
It will also swell the new division’s funds under management (FUM) to about $1 billion, allowing the group to expand its retail offerings in other markets and its wholesale offerings to other forms of agricultural beyond pastoral.
“We are looking at a diversified retail offering in places [such as] Europe and the Middle East and also at opportunities to develop our wholesale fund offering,” said Anthony Abraham, co-chief executive of the new division.
Formerly executive director of Macquarie Funds Group, Abraham will share the business’ chief executive duties with Macquarie executive director Craig Swanger.
Abraham told Money Management the new division “underlines our view of agriculture as an area of opportunity, notwithstanding the current state of the market”.
“As we started to expand our business we saw there was an opportunity for management overlays to happen and for us to thereby offer a lot more fund expertise across the board to our investors,” he said.
Recommended for you
The FSCP has announced its latest verdict, suspending an adviser’s registration for failing to comply with his obligations when providing advice to three clients.
Having sold Madison to Infocus earlier this year, Clime has now set up a new financial advice licensee with eight advisers.
With licensees such as Insignia looking to AI for advice efficiencies, they are being urged to write clear AI policies as soon as possible to prevent a “Wild West” of providers being used by their practices.
Iress has revealed the number of clients per adviser that top advice firms serve, as well as how many client meetings they conduct each week.
