Could you please introduce yourself and your background to the industry?
“Hi, my name is Mark Doran. I started out in operations at a bank where I learned about the operations side of the business there. I learned about funds administration in much more depth when I was doing the training, and a number of companies invited me in to understand how they work on a day-to-day basis. Later on, I became a non-executive director at one of these asset management companies, so I got a lot of experience doing that over the course of about 7 years”.
What is this course about?
“Upon attending this course, we’ll be looking at all the different types of funds that exist out there, from UCITS funds to hedge funds, to private funds, and even ETFs. Once we’ve looked at the different types of funds out there, we’re going to look at the fund operation lifecycle, right through from the investment manager, through the middle office, through accounting for these products and coming up with the valuation of these funds right through to fund accounting which looks at the NAV (net asset value of the fund). We’ll then finish up with the future of the industry, looking at the impact of distributed legislative technology, tokenisation, sound boxes, and much more”.
Can you outline how delegates benefit from attending this course?
“This course is really interactive, and I like to think I’m really approachable, so it gives you the opportunity to ask all the questions you want to on any of the topics and get the useful answers that you can use back in your workplace”.
What do delegates find particularly special about this course?
“Fund accounting can be quite opaque because it’s not something that you find a lot of information about. So, I think what people find really special about this course is that we really get into the details of what’s going on. So we look at how to calculate the NAV, look at, for example, which assets are allowed in that fund because of regulations, and even down to the role of the custodian”.
What aspects of this course do you find most applicable to real-world situations?
“This course looks at a lot of real-world situations. Amongst them, we look at the fund and ETF fact sheets, allowing us to look in-depth at the performance of the fund, and also our SRRIs (synthetic risk and reward indicators), which look at a scale between one and seven, how risky that fund is”.
Learn more about our Investment Fund Operations & Administration course here