Amias Berman & Co, the recently formed fixed-income advisory, origination and brokerage firm, announced that it is now offering services to professional investors in Hong Kong.
The firm received a license from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) to deal in securities as well as to advise on corporate finance. The company's sister company, Amias Berman & Co LLP, announced earlier that the UK Financial Services Authority had given approval for international operations based in London.
"We have put together a very strong team of experienced market professionals across many products and disciplines. We are delighted that our Hong Kong licenses have been approved within the expected timeframe and are now able to work directly with our clients to solve their problems," said co-founder Charlie Berman in a press release.
"We already have more than 30 employees, almost half of whom are in Hong Kong," added co-founder Jeremy Amias, noting that the average tenures in the industry for the people they have recruited exceed 15 years. "We are focused on fixed-income sales with strong expertise in the Asian credit markets, structured credit, asset-backed securities, loans, high yield and bank capital. We are the only firm of our type with a significant operation in Asia and believe our differentiated offering will be of huge benefit to our clients."
They went on to say that the firm will continue to hire experienced people to add to its regional and product capabilities and will open offices in other locations as the business develops. And that they are investing "heavily" in developing technologies to provide both analytics and financial modelling and also assist in the most efficient intermediation and execution of securities broking for large and small institutional investors.
Amias Berman & Co has appointed Pershing Securities (a wholly owned subsidiary of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation) as its clearing and settlement agent on a full Model-B basis.
The two founding partners, together, hold the largest interest in the new business. ICAP has a minority investment in the firm.
