JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans further expansion in Boston this year for its funds servicing business, which expects to complete a transfer services acquisition this quarter.
Of the New York company's roughly 2,000 fund servicing employees worldwide, about 450 are in Boston, including 150 hired in the past year.
On Monday, JPMorgan Chase announced that it planned to hire 50 to 100 more fund servicing employees in Boston this year to provide custody, accounting, investment operations, and fund administrative services for U.S. mutual fund companies, and that it had signed a lease to expand the fund serving business into new office space in downtown Boston.
Daniel Kramer, the global head of JPMorgan Chase's fund services operation, said that its assets under administration rose 15%-20% last year, to $3.3 trillion, and that he expects the same pace of growth this year.
"We are winning our fair share of new business opportunities," he said in an interview Monday. "The Boston site is an important piece for us if we want to grow in the Americas and globally.
"There are many significant clients domiciled in Boston, and there is a strong talent pool here. This was an obvious site for us to expand."
Overall, JPMorgan Chase has more than 1,000 employees in Boston and serves more than 1.5 million consumers. The fund services business also has offices in Europe and Asia.
JPMorgan Chase's other moves in the past year to build its fund services business have included the October hiring of Mr. Kramer, who had been the chief operating officer at Deutsche Asset Management.
On Feb. 26 it announced it was buying Integrated Investment Services' U.S. transfer agency services business from Western and Southern Financial Group of Cincinnati. Integrated Investment Services, also of Cincinnati, is a fund accounting, fund administration and transfer agency services provider. Its U.S. transfer agency services business would be integrated into JPMorgan Chase's U.S. fund services unit.
The companies did not disclose the price of the deal, which is expected to close this quarter.
Mr. Kramer said that JPMorgan Fund Services would continue to add employees incrementally in its Cincinnati and Dallas offices, but that it plans much more hiring in Boston.
"Our other offices are more spread out, so we don't need to expand the plant physically in other area," he said. "We want to work to mesh our Boston servicing capabilities with our Cincinnati servicing capabilities and our Dallas servicing capabilities to develop a model to expand services in the U.S. fund market."
JPMorgan Fund Services provides compliance reporting services to meet regulatory requirements, compliance solutions, financial reporting, fund accounting, fund administration, managed account solutions, transfer agency services, and trustee and depositary services.
JPMorgan Chase works with institutional investors to create and launch exchange-traded funds. It provides services to more than $24 billion of ETF assets, and it helped create the first "share class" ETF, the first enhanced index, inverse index, and foreign-currency-based ETFs.
"As exchange-traded funds expand, we are well positioned to take advantage of that too," Mr. Kramer said.
The fund servicing business is part of JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services, which administers more than $11.5 trillion of assets for asset managers and institutional investors. The fund services business provides a range of services for investment managers and processes more than 30 million securities transactions a year.
