US asset manager Harrison Street receives licence to open ADGM office

Harrison Street, a US-based real estate and infrastructure investment manager, has entered the Middle East market with the opening of an office at Abu Dhabi’s financial hub ADGM.

The company with $56 billion in assets under management has received a financial services licence from ADGM's regulator, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority, Harrison Street said on Tuesday.

The move is part of the company’s global expansion and positions it to “better serve current and prospective clients in the region over the long-term”, it said.

Harrison Street is expanding into the Middle East market at a time when regional investors are increasingly seeking economic diversification and a broader range of international opportunities, including global real assets exposure, the company said.

“While we’ve been providing Middle Eastern investors with exposure to demographic-driven real asset strategies for quite some time, we are excited to now formalise our presence in the Middle East,” Christopher Merrill, co-founder, chief executive of Harrison Street, said.

Harrison Street joins a growing list of asset managers, insurers, financial institutions and investment houses that have chosen to set up a base in the financial hub of UAE capital, to use it as the platform for their regional expansion.

In February, German asset manager Patrizia was granted approval by the FSRA to start operations at ADGM. The Augsburg-based company, which has about €55 billion ($57.7 billion) in assets under management, plans to arrange and advise real estate investments for clients in the region.

The two real estate managers add to a stream of companies including BlackRock that are eager to tap into the Middle East's growing investment market.

New York-based BlackRock, the world's top asset manager with nearly $11.5 trillion in AUM, in November received a commercial licence to operate at ADGM.

In September, ADGM welcomed its first trillion-dollar asset managers: PGIM, the global asset management business of the New York Stock Exchange-listed Prudential Financial, and Chicago investment firm Nuveen, with both aiming to expand their operations and client bases in the Middle East.

The flurry of new additions has pushed the number of firms in ADGM higher during the first quarter of this year, with assets under management also increasing by 33 per cent annually, the financial hub said earlier this month.

The total number of entities operating at ADGM rose by 43 per cent annually to 2,781 in the first three months of this year, it said in a statement. At the end of last year, the financial zone had 2,381 operational entities.