BACKGROUND
Custom House Fund Administration had been on a journey and were now ready to come back again. A recognisable independent business before 2008, Custom House had since been acquired and had become a division of a larger financial services firm, TMF Group.
Looking to unbundle the brand and get back to the core service of fund administration, Mark Hedderman led an MBO in 2015 to take Custom House back to independence. Mark’s objective was to re-establish the Custom House brand, projecting into the future with recognition of its history.
Fund Administration is a required part of the investment fund business where the role of the administrator is to value the assets of the fund and tell the investors how much they are worth. Post financial crisis, Mark believed that there was an opportunity to build trust with global fund managers and their clients with enhanced independent fund administration.
We conducted a number of brand discovery workshops with the Custom House leadership team to understand their particular product and its importance to the market.
Born in the shadow of the Custom House itself in the early 1980s, there was a strong allegiance to that name. Their history was one of developing professional, personal relationships through partnership. However, the Custom House itself may have been out of step with an image of modern finance and so we developed a contemporised mark that captured the form of the building and retold its story for the current generation of fund managers. The lines that shaped the new brandmark accurately represented the nature of the data analysis and accounting under their administration and allowed for further use through the brand’s visual language.
The Specialist Fund Specialist description was supported on all corporate communications, press and website with a more adaptable tagline Powerful Independent Partnership.
Custom House Fund Administration launched in 2015 and with 13 offices and over 200 employees worldwide developed an enviable reputation and was inevitably acquired by its larger competitor in 2019.
We have successfully launched a new brand that has been well received around the world and we credit the team at Principle with helping to achieve this. As a partner to work with who is patient and empathetic as well as professional and committed, I can’t recommend Principle highly enough and we will continue to use them long into the future.
MARK HEDDERMAN, CEO CUSTOM HOUSE GROUP
