Financial Express opens Hong Kong office

Financial Express, the UK’s leading fund data and analysis provider, today announces the opening of its first offshore office, in Hong Kong.

Financial Express collects about 70,000 funds worldwide, including Hong Kong mutual funds and Mandatory Provident Funds (MPF) funds, and is the UK’s leading collector and distributor of fund information, offering fund analysis products as well as custom solutions which can be integrated with client systems and software packages.

The Hong Kong office will offer Hong Kong fund management institutions and financial advisers a range of successful and innovative solutions including Analytics, Factsheet & Literature Production, and Webtools.

Analytics has already been well received by the Hong Kong market with sales confirmed for Henley Group, ING Financial Planning and WMG.

Heading up the Hong Kong office are James Jones and Michael K Li: James Jones is one of the original co-founders of Trustnet (www.trustnet.com), established ten years ago as the first online provider of daily price, performance and factsheet information for investors and financial advisers. Trustnet is now the UK’s leading free fund research website. When Trustnet was acquired by Financial Express in 2002, James became head of sales at Financial Express, and has now relocated to Hong Kong to spearhead the Financial Express Asia Pacific operation.

Michael K Li began his investment career with Gerrards Investment as a fund analyst before moving to Putnam Investments where he was investment specialist for European institutional business with specific responsibility for Currency, European, Asia Pacific and Emerging Markets equity products. Michael has more than eight years of investment industry experience and will work alongside James Jones in sales and business development in the Asia Pacific region.

James Jones, Head of Asia Pacific, Financial Express, says: “As we are already the main, or sole, provider of fund data and solutions to more than 70% of the UK fund management market, it was only a matter of time before we spread our wings and offered our expertise to other parts of the world. This is an incredibly exciting time for the company and we feel sure that our reputation as an innovative, competitive and customer-service driven organisation will position us to help UK and offshore fund management companies create new business opportunities, as well as improve relationships with financial advisers.”