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MUFG Investor Services ’ John Sergides and Joseph Latini
MUFG Investor Services has launched a business consulting group , hiring in expertise from Credit Suisse Prime Services . Global Custodian speaks to John Sergides , CEO , and Joseph Latini , global head of business development , about their ambitions for the new unit .
Global Custodian : Two of your new hires from Credit Suisse – Brian Yegidis and Caley Watnick – have a prime services background . Is prime an area you plan to focus on in particular ? Joseph Latini : Like Brian and Caley , I have also spent a good portion of my career in prime brokerage . I was in PB at Morgan Stanley prior to coming to MUFG , so I understand the landscape extremely well . When you think about how business consulting started in the early to mid- 2000s in the prime brokerage arena , it was really to help emerging hedge fund managers build out their non-investment infrastructure . As the market started to mature , business consulting groups also evolved . They got bigger and they started to do more for clients than just helping understand that non-investment infrastructure portion of their business . If you look at MUFG , and the growth of our ecosystem over the last five years , we don ’ t just provide administration services .
We provide securities lending , fund financing , FX overlay , business process outsourcing , and ESG solutions , just to name a few . When I saw the opportunity to continue to grow out the business development area , I thought business consulting was a perfect place to invest , because by doing this we ’ re going to be able to create a differentiated service that deepens our client relationships and enhances the overall client experience .
GC : What is this business consulting team going to do ? JL : A couple of different things : Client advisory will clearly be the focus . They will be working with our clients across all the different life cycles to build the institutional infrastructure that we talked about thus maximising efficiency . Our clients will , for example , reach out to us to help them benchmark themselves against their peers . We will help answer the questions of ‘ What can we do better ? Where should we be thinking about making other investments ? How can we create efficiency ?’ So that ’ ll be one area . Another is thought leadership . Working with our marketing team , we ’ re going to partner to create valuable content . Our clients want to know what ’ s going on . We ’ re different from the prime brokers . We have more information , and we can utilise a richer set of data . We can provide content that ’ s a little bit different , we can do small- or large-scale conferences , we can create content pieces such as white papers that can help educate our client base about what to anticipate over the next three to five years . Then there is the area of human capital advisory , understanding trends in the marketplace , understanding things like the benefits of working from home and diversity and inclusion , what other clients are doing and how are they doing them , talking to them about talent management . This may not be what admins typically do , but it ’ s what we ’ re going to do , because we ’ re taking a different approach to the way that we work with our clients .
54 Global Custodian Fund Services Annual 2022