Walter Scott to benefit from Mellon distribution network

One of the major benefits Walter Scott and Partners will be able to reap from its acquisition by Mellon Financial Corporation will be the new owner’s distribution network, which will allow Walter Scott to gain more traction for its funds in the global market, according to one of the fund manager’s top executives.

Walter Scott managing director Alan McFarlane said: “There’s the issue of how do we get distribution in an industry that’s moving much more like the Australian model around the rest of the world, and if we do that ourselves we will change the character of the firm.

“We will become much more of a distribution and administrative firm and relatively less of an investment firm,” he said.

McFarlane feels being able to leverage off Mellon’s capabilities in this area will allow Walter Scott to avoid this scenario.

He also cited compliance and administration as the other areas of the business that will be enhanced through the purchase by Mellon, announced back in May of this year, and pointed out that the beauty of the situation was that his firm could basically select the administration systems they wanted to take on and reject those they did not.

“One of the attractions of Mellon as far as we were concerned is the opportunity to tap into their range of administrative systems. The nice thing about the way Mellon works is that none of that is mandatory,” McFarlane said.

“So where some of the compliance finance and IT issues are mandatory this is not, and we get to choose which bits of the admin systems used within Mellon we can take advantage of,” he explained.

McFarlane did stress the relationship was unlikely to see Mellon award Walter Scott large amounts of funds to manage.

“Mellon doesn’t have a vast amount of money under management that it can just give us to manage. It’s got a discretionary management business in the private wealth arena, but in terms of what we’re talking about with Mellon is a range of opportunities that we might cooperate on,” he said.

The Walter Scott Global Equity Fund is available to Australian investors as part of the Macquarie Professional series group of managed funds.