BBH moves Joseph Conway to Hong Kong
US-based custodian Brown Brothers Harriman has moved another big gun from Boston to Hong Kong. Joseph Conway, global head of sales for BBH's Infomediary product, arrived a month ago.
He reports to Lorrie Gordon, who was named global head of Infomediary last week, and will work with Andrew Tucker, the BBH partner responsible for Asia, and William Rosensweig, managing director of BBH Hong Kong.
Another colleague, Jay Lin, is also relocating from Boston to Hong Kong to work on the Infomediary service team, and these moves all come on the back of recent strengthening of the securities-lending team in the region.
Conway, a 20-year BBH employee, tells AsianInvestor that initial feedback from trips to see clients and potential clients in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and China has been encouraging. New clients are signing up, but he would not give any names.
He will reside in Hong Kong, but will also oversee London and Tokyo, and retain responsibility for worldwide business development. As part of the infomediary team in Boston, Conway has been instrumental in acquiring and servicing most of Infomediary's 165 clients over the past six years, and is one of the biggest contributors to the development of this technology solution.
Conway's relocation is part of a major commitment to Asia and is part of BBH's plans to add to a pan-Asian servicing hub in Hong Kong, says Tucker.
Infomediary is a communications platform that enables clients to achieve straight-through processing and operational liquidity by streamlining provider communications and eliminating manual processes. It can be applied to a range of services, which include securities-settlement notification solutions that BBH sells to banks and asset managers globally. It also includes a facility to automate and net foreign-exchange flows.
BBH would not say how many Infomediary clients it had in Asia or how much business it has brought in, but it says it is improving the efficiency of clients' day-to-day activities. For example, an asset manager in Taiwan was, until recently, receiving orders from distributor banks by fax. As the asset manager was a client, BBH helped it sort out an electronic ordering system.
The opening of the firm's Beijing representative office last year and the relocation this year of Tucker to the region have marked important milestones for BBH in terms of building a strong base in Asia, says the firm.
In Asia, BBH operates out of Beijing, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and serves leading institutions in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and Australia as a provider of global custody, administration and related services.