Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 8 April 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Investment Commitments to SME Sector: National Treasury Management Agency

2:35 pm

Mr. Eugene O'Callaghan:

There is a business strategy question as to how much of the fund we would invest directly and how much we would invest through third party managers. Ultimately, the split between the two remains to be decided. I am certain there will be some of each. For high volume lower value transactions, it would not make sense for our small team to try to get involved. Equally, if there were high value low volume transactions, it would not necessarily make sense to hire somebody else to do something we could relatively speaking do ourselves. There is also a specialist skill question. In other words, if we were investing in, say, bio-tech companies or something like that in respect of which scientific knowledge is required, unless we felt that we had a programme that we could definitely do for the next five or ten years and it was worth bringing that skill on board, typically we would go through third party managers who already have those specialist skills in place.