A Future of Finance Interview with Apex Group founder and CEO Peter Hughes and Head of Digital Assets Bruce Jackson.
The Apex Group has grown from an idea in the minds of two people in Bermuda just over 20 years ago to a global fund administration business employing 13,000 people across 112 offices around the world to look after assets under administration worth more than US$1 trillion. Such rapid expansion by acquisition was made possible by the support of major private equity investors – they include Genstar, Carlyle and Mubadala – but Apex is more than a classic roll-up story. The firm has retained its original bias to alternative strategies, but has moved far beyond fund accounting, transfer agency and management company services to embrace capital introductions, depositary and custody services and an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) ratings and advisory service. But what really distinguishes Apex from other fund administrators is its embrace of new technologies in general and blockchain technologies in particular. It has not only supported several tokenised fund issues but invested in a tokenisation engine (the Luxembourg-based Tokeny) and in the London-based FundAdminChain (which began as a fund tokenisation platform but morphed into an automated investor due diligence checking and on-boarding service). No other fund administrator has shown a comparable level of material commitment to a tokenised future for the funds industry. As Dominic Hobson, Co-founder of Future of Finance, found out when he spoke to Apex Group founder and CEO Peter Hughes and Head of Digital Assets Bruce Jackson, the enthusiasm of the senior management for tokenisation is not about intellectual curiosity but long-term survival and success.
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