BT Investment Management (BTIM) has experienced an improvement in sentiment among its institutional clients and expects $500 million in mandates to get funded throughout the year.
"What we have seen, more so offshore, is that institutional investors have delayed some of their investment program in the December quarter of last year on concerns of whether there was another big down let yet to come," BTIM chief executive Emilio Gonzalez said yesterday.
"The talk around town was if [the] euro collapses there will be another big down let, so a lot put off their investments. That has turned around now, so we expect some of these investments to come through during the course of the year.
"All up in terms of both businesses we have about half a billion of mandates that we've been awarded, but have not yet funded."
Yesterday, BTIM reported its results for the six months to 31 March 2012, with the company's net result 24 per cent lower at $11.2 million.
The result was impacted on by charges relating to the acquisition of JO Hambro Capital Management last year, Gonzalez said.
But he said inflows had held up reasonably well, considering industry-wide outflows took place mainly in Australian equities, an area that represented 30 per cent of the company's revenues.
"On the Australian institutional [side] we had net [inflows of] $100 million, which is a great result, if you consider we had one large Australian equity mandate outflow," he said.
"If it wasn't for the Aussie equity outflow, we would have been up $600 million for BTIM Australia."
In November last year, BTIM lost a more than $500 million mandate from an unnamed institutional client.
JO Hambro also held up well in terms of inflows.
"The Hambro business was net $300 million in terms of their [institutional] flows, so it is $400 million net positive flows," Gonzalez said.
"Let's not forget in the December quarter there was a lot of heightened angst around Europe and a lot of question marks around whether the euro would be a sustainable currency long term, but despite that we managed to generate positive flows."
BTIM's total funds under management, in both the retail and institutional businesses, rose by 27 per cent, from $36.1 billion in the first half of 2011 to $45.8 billion at the end of March this year.
