HLDR DWNTN (EN) – Highlander Downtown North

WHO

Highlander Downtown North is a Swedish financial technology company majority owned by the investment company Highlander Uptown.

Both companies were founded in 2015 by Anders Bergh together with two long standing international friends/colleagues. All three have significant experience and deep knowledge of investment management and capital markets globally.

WHY

The financial world is currently going through a period of massive upheaval, its very own version of the industrial revolution – the “findustrial revolution”. This is due to significant changes in the regulatory environment over the last few years, the associated increases in the cost of capital and the rapid development of technology.

One of the outcomes of this tectonic shift in the landscape has been the negative impact on the prime brokerage units of large global banks, one of their core businesses, which for decades has provided them with many different layers of income.

Due to the above mentioned changes, banks have been forced to shrink or withdraw from this business. This has inevitably created opportunities for those prepared to be proactive rather than reactive.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

From 2009 to 2013, Anders Bergh was in charge of all active investment processes, head of Alpha Management at Swedbank Robur, the biggest mutual fund house in Scandinavia. This group comprised of 60 internal active managers, interacting with 25 execution managers and 20 allocation managers, populating 150 funds and managing active mandates of USD 63 Billion, providing the company yearly management fees, the mission was to activate the controlled risk appetite in order to meet the fund unitholders demand of net performance.

Anders designed and developed a new business plan that was subsequently approved by the board of directors and top management. In brief, the business plan targets were to identify sustainable investment processes (IP), apply risk management on those identified IP’s , activate the IP on managed accounts with the biggest prime brokers, become more cost efficient with credit lines and derivatives and do carve-outs in order to reuse the IP in different products such as funds, notes and total return swaps. By implementing the business plan, Anders learned a lot about both the possibilities and constraints with technology, internal working processes, internal managers and fund regulations amongst many other things. Anders engaged the biggest prime brokers for managed account and carve outs and was a member of most of the working management steering groups in these matters.

Highlander is learning from this and intends to deliver an adaptable product.

WHAT

By combining modern technology with expert knowledge of the asset management business, Highlander Downtown North is building flexible technical architecture to bring together investors and investment managers in a new way and one that provides much greater control for the investor, massive improvements in real-time information reporting and risk management that were previously only available to banks risk departments.

HOW

Since January 2015 Highlander has been developing software and infrastructure that connects and collates information from the multiple points of contact than an investor has with their numerous banks and investment managers and brings it all together into one place.

By using an investor’s existing business agreements and facilities with their Prime broker/Custodian, Highlander enables aggregated attribution and risk control as well as real time reporting to the investors.

HOW HIGHLANDER MAKES MONEY

Highlander’s only client is the investor and Highlander gets paid for providing the administration, infrastructure and resources.

The investment managers get paid for delivering portfolio attributions and the banks get paid for providing the business facilities (as per today).

This way, the investor knows exactly what they are paying for and why. In addition, the investment manager’s interests are brought more closely into line with those of the investor.

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