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Dermot Butler By Beverly Chandler, Opalesque London:

One of the most familiar characters in fund administration in Europe, is Dermot Butler, chairman of Custom House Group, the firm he founded in 1989, which now has its head office in Malta, subsidiaries in Dublin, Chicago, Luxembourg, Guernsey, Amsterdam and Singapore. Since that 1989 launch, Custom House has grown to administer US$ 45 bn in assets for over 200 clients.

In an interview with Opalesque, Butler explains that growth for Custom House had been fairly steady over the years until it hit the industry wide financial crisis from 2008 to 2009.

"We had avoided the credit fund risk because I took the view that an administrator was supposed to be offering an independent valuation" Butler explains. However, he found that many credit funds almost required administrators to value their portfolios using a model supplied by the manager. "That's not independent so we refused to do it" he says.

Having avoided actually administering funds that lay at the heart of the financial crisis, Custom House was still somewhat hit by what Butler calls 'the ATM syndrome.'

"I thought rather smugly that we were immune to market downturn" he confesses, "but following the Lehman and Madoff collapses, our biggest funds suffered ATM syndrome - if they had no gates or sidepockets, they were used as a source of cash." Over 2008/9, Custom House saw a 25-30% drop in funds under administration......................

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