Fund Launch & Capital Raising Advice – MARQ Trustees

Fund to Market and Capital Raising Advice

MARQ Trustees offers hands-on AFSL support to help you attain your investment management objectives.

Fund to Market and Capital Raising Advice

MARQ Trustees collaborates with experienced professionals in tax structuring, legal documentation, financial modelling, marketing, insurance, and capital raising advice.

Our clients enjoy the certainty and efficiency of working with experts, leading to cost savings, risk reduction, high-quality products, shorter timelines, and compliance adherence. Our longstanding partnerships ensure exceptional value for our clients.

MARQ Trustees has a long record of partnering successfully with Investment Managers – from experienced hands, through to first-time participants. We have the technical skill-set and professional resources to manage and drive the mesh of interdependent tasks needed to structure, establish, and operate your Fund. Our approach is flexible, ensuring you receive only the services you need, in line with your experience and your available in-house resources.

Experienced Investment Managers

MARQ Trustees provides a full suite of services that covers your Fund’s AFS Licensing requirements, custody, fund administration (including back-and middle office functions), KYC and investor registry, investor reporting, and other related services needed to operate your Fund successfully. Additionally, we can assist you with your financial modelling, research, tax and accounting, marketing and communications (including design and production of your Information Memorandum), and provide capital-raising advice.. If there are gaps in your in-house capabilities or resources, we are happy to provide the missing services you need.

First-time Investment Managers

Before you can raise money from investors through a Fund, you need to complete a whole range of legal and technical matters. This is a substantial undertaking, where a lack of knowledge or experience may result in time delays, rework, cost overruns, or penalties. Potentially all four. Some participants who are new to Investment Management may find this is beyond their in-house capabilities, and engage various outside experts for assistance. Even then, they must coordinate the services of external consultants, manage inter-dependencies, and ensure they meet their requirements and those of the Fund’s Trustee, Administrator and Registrar without breaching the financial services law, tax law, or ASIC policy. This includes bringing all the elements together, and drafting sections of the Information Memorandum that fall to them for completion. MARQ Trustees can provide many of these services directly, and project-manage and drive the remainder on your behalf and in your best-interests; removing what is often a major headache and a drain on your time and resources.

Bringing it all together

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Tax structuring & design

Comprehensive tax services to optimize the structure and tax status of your fund and meet all regulatory requirements.

The way in which a fund is structured, both legally and for tax purposes, can have a significant impact on the outcome for investors and the Investment Manager. MARQ Trustees is well placed to advise and assist in identifying the best legal, commercial, and tax efficient structure for a proposed investment.

There are multiple factors to be considered, including asset class, investment strategy (capital growth or income yielding), number and type of investors, investor tax residency, different classes of units/interests in the fund, whether the units/interest will be fully or partly paid, whether capital will be committed and called in tranches or paid in full upfront, whether distributions will be paid or reinvested, withdrawal mechanisms and performance fee optimisation. It is worth noting that how a fund is taxed depends on whether it is classed as a managed investment trust, an attribution managed investment trust, a public trading trust, or whether it is under the general taxing provisions of the Tax Act that apply to trusts.

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LEGAL DOCUMENTATION

Robust legal support to navigate intricate financial regulations, ensuring compliance and sound legal foundations for your investment funds.

MARQ Trustees has a trusted panel of law firms that has served our clients well for many years, across most, if not all, asset classes. All firms on our panel are ranked as ‘leaders in investment funds’ Australia-wide by Chambers Asia Pacific Guide, and recognised on the list of Best Lawyers in Australia. Drafting the Fund’s Constitution (Trust Deed) and other transaction documents is a collaborative process in which lawyers draft, and MARQ Trustees reviews, the requisite documents. This ensures they are fit for purpose in meeting the commercial objectives and desired tax outcomes.

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FINANCIAL MODELLING

Expert financial modelling services to guide your investment decisions, ensuring precision and informed choices in a complex financial landscape.

The target return is a key driver of the Fund’s investment proposition. It is therefore crucial that the financial model and calculations are accurate. This requires sophisticated financial modelling of the investment proposition, including the timing of equity flows, debt flows, pipeline investments, distributions to investors, and returns of capital. The model should be tested across a range of assumptions to build the best result. MARQ Trustees can assist in this process, and have an independent expert verify and endorse the target return – giving investors added confidence in its veracity.

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MARKETING & COMMUNICATION

Tailored marketing solutions to reach your target audience effectively, whether institutional or high net worth investors and enhance your investment proposition.

Investment capital in Australia is divided into three distinct pools – Institutional, Adviser, and Investor. Marketing to each – and accounting for their unique expectations and requirements – is very different to marketing to people acquiring products or services. The decision-making criteria is framed within a different worldview, and it is often guided by third-party advice. Regulators add to that mix with their own strong views on what investment managers are permitted to do and say.

MARQ Trustees is aligned with fund branding, marketing, and communications experts. They have the experience and skills to position your Fund as an attractive proposition to the targeted investor market, while staying in line with the highly regulated framework of a managed investment scheme. This enables you to take your Fund to market with a powerful investment proposition, well explained, professionally presented, and produced in whatever on-line and off-line formats you need to support your sales process.

MARQ Trustees’ network extends to accurate and culturally-targeted translation and marketing services across a range of languages including Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, and Simplified), Japanese, Korean and Hindi.

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Investment Manager Insurance

Insurance solutions designed to provide cover for claims alleging misrepresentation, acts, errors and omissions in connection with financial or investment services.

The exposures arising from investment activities are significant and compensatory claims or regulatory inquiries against investment managers and their directors may be intertwined. Investment Managers Insurance (IMI) is a suite of insurance covers designed so that a single policy, issued by one insurer, responds to the common exposures faced by the industry. MARQ Trustees’ panel of insurance brokers are experts in this highly specialised area and can provide expert advice and guidance in brokering the appropriate types and level of cover.

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Property Investment Research Reports

Where required by property investment funds, MARQ Trustees’ research partner covers sector level research, ratings, and recommendations on listed and unlisted property funds.

MARQ Trustees’ research partner covers sector level research, ratings, and recommendations on listed and unlisted property funds. Over the last decade, their team has evaluated over 500 different funds. Property funds that achieve a rating of ‘strongly recommended’ or ‘recommended’ gain considerable credibility with investors. These ratings are often essential before a fund can be included on financial planners’ approved investment product list. The report is published on the company’s website, and distributed to a wide network of investors, financial planners, advisers, and property professionals.

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Capital raising advice

MARQ Trustees offers capital raising advice, along with services encompassing marketing and communication strategies tailored to institutional, adviser, and investor audiences, supported by expert fund branding and research partners.

Knowing your capital raising options and obligations – who you can target and how – enables you to raise money confidently and in compliance with the law. This is not an area where you want to make mistakes. In addition, MARQ Trustees can provide you with broad guidance on available capital raising channels, and connect you to experts in this space where your marketing budget, timeframe, investment sector, and other criteria are a good fit.