“We can bring Vietnam to the UK by independent financial advisers.”
This is what Dragon Capital chairperson Dominic Scriven OBE told Money Marketing whilst discussing Vietnam’s largest fund manager.
Scriven co-founded Dragon Capital in 1994 after he travelled to Vietnam in the early 1990s to learn Vietnamese at Hanoi General University.
One of Dragon Capital’s funds, the Vietnam Enterprise Investment Limited (VEIL) is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
He said for the past two years the company has been reaching out to the IFA community in the UK which he “is convinced is the right move for us”. However, he added this will take “patience and perseverance”.
Dragon Capital is engaging with Hargreaves Lansdown and its adviser network and via this move want to break into the IFA market.
An issue that Dragon Capital has faced is that Vietnam is not technically defined as an emerging market (EM) but rather a frontier market.
A frontier market is a country that is more established than the least developed countries but still less established than the EMs.
This has resulted in IFAs placing Dragon Capital’s funds in a high risk category. Scriven said “what we need is for Vietnam to become an EM for IFAs to really start talking about our funds with their clients”.
However, he added that Vietnam and Dragon Capital “will get there”.
The Vietnamese gross domestic product growth was 8% in 2022, which is the country’s highest rate in 10 years.
Ideally, he wants the VEIL to bring Vietnam to the world and added that Dragon Capital is a member of the Association of Investment Companies.
In regards to the Financial Conduct Authority and its introduction of the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) on 31 December 2012, Scriven said it has not had much of an impact on Dragon Capital.
This is due to the fact that Dragon Capital was not deeply engaged with UK IFAs prior to RDR and so the company entered the market after it was implemented.
Due to this, Dragon Capital created relationships in the UK after RDR was implemented.
Dragon Capital has $5bn in assets under management.
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