Mr. Pat Lardner:

I thank the Chairman and members for the invitation to participate in today’s meeting.

Irish Funds - the Irish Funds Industry Association - is the representative body for the international investment community in Ireland. Founded in 1991, Irish Funds represents fund managers, depositories, administrators, transfer agents, professional advisory firms and other specialist firms involved in the international financial services industry in Ireland. Our members provide services in respect of funds domiciled in Ireland in addition to those domiciled overseas. The investors in these funds are from more than 70 countries around the world, the investment managers of the funds originate from 50 different countries and the underlying investments held are also truly global in nature.

Before I go into the detail on Brexit, let me explain what Irish Funds do. At the most basic level the industry in Ireland provides a range of services, including investment management, risk management, fund administration, advisory oversight and governance, which allow investors to pool their moneys together collectively via funds in a regulated environment to invest so as to generate returns and manage risk. Regulated investment managers provide the ideas for these strategies and consequently our role is that of enabling investment and savings. Ireland’s funds industry has four core characteristics. First, it is an export-based services industry whose size and trajectory is not dependent on that of the domestic economy in Ireland. Second, it plays an important role in delivering investment capital into economies. Third, it is highly regulated and benefits from EU financial services passports, which I will come back to in the context of Brexit, and fourth, it is sizeable and successful in both European and global terms.

The fund management and fund services industries play a key role in helping people provide for their futures and channel savings to companies, Government agencies and financial institutions who have a variety of short and long term capital requirements. By collecting investment capital and deploying it efficiently to generate investment returns with a range of risk-return objectives, the industry also supports the development of a capital markets union, which is a key building block of the European Commission’s investment plan for Europe.

The business of internationally-distributed investment funds is highly regulated and Ireland has developed into a significant domicile and administration centre for such fund products within a legal and regulatory environment supervised locally and anchored in a number of European directives. These facilitate EU market access by way of a combination of financial services passports, the ability to delegate certain activities, equivalence rules and other requirements. Ireland is a major fund export centre that connects investment expertise and investor demand - this has supported the growth of both our own and the wider EU funds industry during almost three decades.