Funds administration is a key part of the Irish financial services landscape. It's also a highly competitive industry with tight margins. According to Alan Meaney co-founder of start-up company, Fund Recs, this has led to an increased amount of routine processing work being outsourced to locations outside Ireland.

"Fund administration here has reached an all-time high but one trend that doesn't get a lot of attention is the volume of work being sub-contracted to lower cost bases such as India, " he says. "Our aim is to reverse this trend by offering technology that will allow Irish workers carry out these tasks in a cost effective and efficient way. In a nutshell, our system is designed to help fund administrators automate their data reconciliation processes."

Meany is a technology and business graduate with almost a decade’s experience in the funds administration industry. His co-founder, Pádraig Ó Scanáill, is a software engineer. “We were working on another business idea completely when a friend who works in funds administration floated the idea of us developing a reconciliation software system,” Meaney says.

“From my experience in the industry I knew where the problems lay and the more we thought about it the more the scale of the opportunity became clear. With €2.5 trillion in assets under administration, Ireland has copper-fastened its position as the number one hedge fund servicing centre in the world with 43 per cent of the globe’s assets and the fastest growing UCITS (undertakings for collective investment in transferable securities) domicile. We subsequently dropped our original idea and turned out full attention to developing Fund Recs instead,” Meaney says.

Fund Recs has been helped on its way by a small amount of private investment, some assistance from Waterford Enterprise Board and by Enterprise Ireland's New Frontiers programme which is based at the DIT Hothouse and pays participants the equivalent of a small salary for six months. This allowed Meaney to quit his job and work on the business full time.

“We see ourselves as having two income strands – licensing the software and providing a Dublin-based processing outsourcing service,” Meaney says. “From speaking to key industry executives it was clear there was a real need for a cheaper alternative to doing reconciliations in-house and that using lower cost providers had become increasingly unattractive. There were problems with the quality of the work and costs in places like India are rising. What makes Fund Recs different to existing systems is that we are building the first truly automated reconciliation system from the ground up.”

Fund Recs will have its official launch in the first quarter of 2014 and is looking to raise €250,000 in seed investment. Meaney expects the company to create 10 jobs in 2014.

– OLIVE KEOGH