Cashel is becoming a player in the global financial sector

Martin O’Connor (below) talks to Nick Wheeler in the latest of his series of interviews with Tipperary-based executives about working and living in Tipperary

When I usually arrive at Cashel Town Shopping Centre, I am not normally focused on matters of global finance, but more on the special offers I may pick up in Tesco or how my end bill may have risen due to current cost of living increases.

However, on this occasion I am here to meet with Nick Wheeler, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Waystone, a major financial services group, whose offices are housed within the complex.
Waystone’s acquisition of Link Fund Solutions, completed on October 9, along with the corporate merger with KB Associates which was finalised in late September, means Waystone is now supporting asset managers with more than US$2 trillion of assets under management. Such a mind-boggling sum of money jolts me away from my thoughts on Tesco’s special offers.

VETERAN
Nick is a veteran of the global financial sector having spent many years working for major international financial institutions such as Citibank, Barings Asset Management and HSBC in locations including London, Luxembourg and Dublin.
But after all this global travel and experience, Nick now finds himself back home in Tipperary having moved to Cahir as a child in the late 80s and attending school in Cashel.

“We were living in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia where my mum and dad had met. My mum, who is from Tipperary, was a nurse in Riyadh and my dad worked in the oil industry. We moved to Cahir in Tipperary in 1989 not long before the first Gulf War. I went to school in Cashel at The Deanery just down the road from these offices, and I then went to secondary school in Dublin and then to university at Trinity College. Cahir is still my home and has been since day one of arriving in Ireland,” Nick.
I asked Nick why Cashel was chosen to be a key office for a huge global company in the financial service sector when such a major presence had never previously existed in the town or the county.

“The genesis of Cashel and Waystone was the acquisition of AVCS, a finance company in the aviation sector, which had about 12 people and was based above the health food shop on Main Street in Cashel.
We really liked the staff we now had in Cashel and the skill sets we were attracting to the area. Combined, this gave us great confidence in our plans for the future and subsequently led to discussions with the Industrial Development Authority (IDA).
This property in town then became available and we decided to take it on and working with the IDA and Tipperary County Council - both of whom were incredibly supportive - we set about our growth plans.
I had handed in my notice to Barings just as the news about Covid broke.
My first two years here were trying to build this office up remotely so it was a tricky couple of years. It was very difficult but we got through it together……we worked very well remotely.
We now have over 150 staff here,” said Nick Wheeler.
And has the fact that the office is located in Cashel and Tipperary contributed to the company’s success?

GREAT PEOPLE
“Yes, very much so. We have found great people in the region; the town and county are centrally located to take advantage of all major airports and is easily accessible by quality motorways and rail networks.
And, crucially, it is a pro-business location with strong collaboration with local authorities, organisations, universities and the local community.
Add to this the rich culture of food, festivals, sport and unrivalled scenic countryside and it’s not hard to see why the area is so attractive to the company and its people as a base and as a place to live,” he added.
Has being from Tipperary and your family’s home still being here also had an influence on the group locating in Cashel?
Nick smiles broadly and says “I met the previous CEO at an industry event and I just happened to mention that I was from Tipperary and his ears pricked up at that and he had a meeting arranged in my diary the next day. The stars aligned really.

This opportunity that I was given is as unique an opportunity as you will ever get; there is no Funds industry in Tipperary, so just to be given this opportunity to build something in the area that I’m from is simply incredible. I never thought that an opportunity like this would arise. We are the biggest financial services provider outside of retail banks in Tipperary.”

Above: Waystone staff in Cashel at their recent charity Bake Off competition which was held to support School Aonghusa in Cashel. Also included is the judge for the evening Stephen Hayes, Culinary Director at the Cashel Palace Hotel

GLOBAL SECTOR
The global financial services sector is incredibly complex, highly regulated and fast paced and I asked Nick to describe what Waystone does from its Cashel office in terms of this massive global sector.

“The clients we service are predominantly Asset Managers and Hedge Fund Managers who are looking to set up funds in the Irish, Luxembourg or UK markets. It is costly for them to build the infrastructure needed to obtain the right licences and regulatory permissions to operate their fund structures. Typically, they will look to buy our platform that we have already set up and leverage our regulatory and compliance skill sets and expertise. They rely on our people and our substance in those markets. What we strive for is to leave the asset manager to focus on their expertise in investing and adding value to that investment; all the back-office functions, the various governance, risk, compliance and fund administration responsibility stays with us,” he said.

And is the Cashel office key in delivering this expertise and benefits to investment funds around the world?
“100%. Cashel is crucial in our global operations and ability to deliver globally. Waystone has grown up largely inorganically through acquisition and every acquisition we have made has always in some way, shape or form resulted in the Cashel office growing because when people see what we have achieved here they can see how their businesses can benefit by leveraging Cashel’s capabilities and expertise.

While we have functions here that the Waystone Group and its offices around the world can leverage a benefit from, many of them are revenue generating functions and that is very important for the growth of the Cashel office.
“My intention is for Waystone Cashel to continue to evolve and the upskilling of our staff will be critical to that journey,” added Nick Wheeler.

Above: Nick Wheeler, Chief Operating Officer, Waystone at a welcoming event in Mumbai, India, with some of the 600 new staff to join Waystone following its acquisition of Link Fund Solutions

EXTREMELY PROUD
What would be your highlight since you took the role?
“I am extremely proud of Waystone’s Global Centre of Excellence (COE) that we set up here in Cashel. When I started the COE was in its very early inception. We had, and continue to have, huge support from the leadership team to build out the operations here and now we have centralised and standardised a whole range of activities which were being performed in higher cost jurisdictions. Many of these have been centralised in Cashel and we now have an incredible team here looking at things like client regulatory reporting, fund registration corporate secretarial services, board support and we have successfully centralised the entire Waystone Group’s Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) offerings.
“It’s a genuinely specialised team here that has grown up in Cashel and has developed an incredible level of expertise in these areas.
“This has allowed the group to standardise the global operating model so now across all jurisdictions we have a single approach,” he said.

Are most of the staff recruited from Tipperary?
We love the skill sets we get here. The majority are Tipperary based. As I mentioned, Tipperary is fortunate in terms of its geographic positioning and with flexible working we can also cast the net out a little further and we do have people who commute to the office for three days a week from Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny which is important for us to do also. I always remind my friends and colleagues that its not a long way to Tipperary.

And do you ever get people who, like yourself, gained international experience elsewhere and then returned home?
“Yes, and that’s really important for us and the town. My colleague, Sarah Wallace, who took over the leadership of the Centre of Excellence after me, spent 20 years in Pfizer in Dublin running a very large regional role there and she wanted to move back here. Being able to hire somebody who has got that level of corporate experience behind them, has managed big teams, and worked on very large business projects is a fantastic win for us here in Cashel.

COMMUNITY
Her husband is a GP in Cashel so I think it is a wonderful example which sees the business, the town and the community benefitting from their move back home”
As a global person how has life been for Nick back in Tipperary?
“It’s been great, I love being back. It’s the first time in 30 years that I’ve been able to drive to work. It has always been tubes, trains and buses. I’m in a role that requires a lot of travel and that will increase but I will retain my office here in Cashel, that’s for sure.”

Do you ever stop and think and have a sense of pride having lived here and then seeing this small office grow into being a key part of a global leader in financial services?
‘It is the proudest moment of my career to date for sure. We have a lot of staff here in Cashel who have been with us since the start and those staff are forging great careers in the town where they are from. I’ve seen junior people go through various promotion cycles here, people applying for and getting mortgages here and all that is off the back of having a good solid career.

If you turned the clock back four years and said you were going to put 150 people in Cashel for a financial services firm when at the time there was nothing here, it may have raised a few eyebrows but Tipperary County Council and particularly Anthony Fitzgerald, Head of Enterprise, and Will Corcoran and Aisling O’Carroll at the IDA were incredibly supportive in making it happen. We also got fantastic support from The South East Financial Services Cluster.”
Financial services are a very demanding and often pressurised sector, do you still manage to have some fun amidst these pressures?

BAKE OFF
“We have a great social scene in the office which is really important to us.
“We’ve just done our second annual ‘Bake Off’ competition here a couple of weeks ago and both times we had a judge from the Cashel Palace Hotel; last year we had the pastry chef and this year it was the Director of Culinary, so people took it very seriously!

Every year the staff choose a charity to donate the monies raised by such events and this year it was Scoil Aonghusa.
“The staff also did a hike for the school and in a few weeks, we are having a table quiz to raise further funds.
“We do our best to maintain our own work community and hopefully add to the one in which we are based”
Does such a thing as ‘spare time’ exist given the current global developments and acquisitions?

HOME OF WAYSTONE
“I do travel a lot and that is just part of the job. I watch a lot of rugby and have over the years followed the Irish Rugby Team at three World Cups.
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go to any games this year but I did go to Bordeaux for two weeks with some friends and my brother and his family, where we were still able to take in the atmosphere of the tournament.
“My brother is a chef so he looked after us all very well!”
The interview finishes, we say our good byes and while walking across the car park a thought came to me. When I tell people from both Ireland and overseas that I live near Cashel I more than often get the response ‘ah, the Rock of Cashel’.
More recently I have started to receive the occasional response of ‘ah The Cashel Palace Hotel’.
I wonder in the future, given the global growth of the business being run out of Cashel will I ever receive: “Ah, the home of Waystone”?