We closed our sales office in New York and we plan to open sales offices in Vietnam and in Saudi Arabia.
We doubled our efforts on offering Andetta services (with strong focus on Taiwan and East Asia). In addition, we are striving to grow our Funds Administration sales with new teams in Peru, Lima and Mexico. On the business support services side we focus on the Global Expansion Services, joining budding multi-nationals on their road to internationalization.
We intensified our marketing activities in an important developing continent specifically in Africa, with seminars and roadshows throughout East Africa.
And we created a team in Brazil to push local fund administration services there.
With the Turkish economy growing fast we opened our Istanbul sales representative office in September of 2018. We worked hard on convincing as many clients as possible to convert under the new realities of CRS and BEPS.
We established an office in Panama for Amicorp clients who previously were serviced by another trust service provider, in addition to having various client portfolios from a number of Amicorp offices transferred to this new office. The key product offered are the Panama Foundation and the Panama SA.
We intensified our marketing activities in an important developing continent: Africa, with seminars and roadshows throughout East Africa.
We introduced the concept of the Four Pillars of Assurance throughout Amicorp, ensuring that the UBO is compliant with KYC requirements, in compliance with the laws of the jurisdiction of incorporation or residence, with complete monitoring of all transactions and compliant with FATCA and CRS reporting.
We completed a major long running CSR project in Desa Les, Bali, Indonesia, providing villagers of this deprived district with over 700 kamar mandis, or bathrooms, which have radically reduced the incidence of disease. This year also saw the purchase and breaking ground of the Desa Les Community Center, a skills training center for teenagers and young adults from Desa Les. The skills to be offered will range from the hospitality sector, cultural preservation, permaculture, living values education and more.
Our business from Asian clients, grew relatively much faster than in other parts of the world. We are increasing our brand recognition as well as our understanding of the true needs in the various markets.
We organized a range of well-attended seminars throughout the region that helped to grow our Asian footprint. Our office in Dubai, where we established free-zone trading companies, has been material in broadening our service platform.
We also opened a new office in The Bahamas.
AmiLife Insurance PCC Ltd was established as a non-domestic life insurance company offering a single premium investment linked product for wealth management purposes. In support hereof we setup an office in the Seychelles.
We established an office in the Cayman Islands to meet our clients growing demand for services from this robust Caribbean center, and also set up an office in Lima, Peru.
We agreed to acquire a portfolio of up to 1,000 management mandates for trust and corporate entities.
In early 2013 we opened an office in Montevideo, Uruguay, focusing on servicing corporate and private clients in South America. We also opened an office in the Cayman Islands.
In September 2013, we acquired a company management provider in Monaco and thus added Monaco to our list of services on offer to our clients.
We opened an office in Mauritius. Besides offering services geared primarily to African and Indian markets, we created a full backup platform for our fund administration services which became operational mid-2013.
In Hong Kong, we started our pre-IPO desk to help primarily Chinese customers with legal and administrative procedures required to become eligible for a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
We opened new offices in China (Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Beijing). In Shanghai, we established a sourcing company to help non-Chinese clients find the right partners in China.
In Dubai, we opened an office to build a relationship network in the Middle East and to offer free-zone trading companies from Dubai.
Opening Bogota ensured we had a presence in all key Latin American markets. With the economy of Colombia booming, foreign direct investments are growing and need proper structuring.
In South Africa, we established an office in Pretoria to provide back office accounting in Dutch, Afrikaans and German within the European time zone, but at a much lower cost than Europe.
We established an office in South Africa and opened an office in Moscow, achieving our goal of having a physical presence in all BRICS economies. A new office in Madrid complemented the Barcelona office and gave our Latin American investors’ greater choice.
We acquired facilities in Davao, the Philippines, enabling us to offer scanning and accounting services from a very inexpensive location in a practical time zone.
We opened offices in Shenzhen (China) mainly to interact with fund managers and to offer services in that city. We also opened our Malta, and Delhi (India) office.
We acquired the first systems for Amicorp Bank and Trust (ABT), enabling us to open bank accounts for our clients, and to offer credit cards and make payments (via SWIFT).
In 2010 Amicop Bangalore became ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified, and also Amicorp BVI became ISO 9001 certified. Amicorp Fund Services achieved ISAE 3402 certification.
We worked hard to establish a presence in Asia (both India and the Far East), and to eliminate inefficiencies and outmoded solutions throughout the organization.
We improved quality systems, introduced an enterprise risk management (ERM) system and gave internal audit more substance. Overall, our organization became more streamlined, more efficient and our Curaçao office transitioned to ISO 9001 certification.
We focused on improving overall quality and capabilities in Bangalore which became the largest office in the Group. We began offering accounting and other BPO services to third parties.
In Barbados, we obtained permission to establish a bank with a limited license - , the Amicorp Bank and Trust. The Guangzhou office was moved to Shanghai and we increased marketing activities in East Asia.
We re-established an office in Amsterdam, and opened offices in Barbados and Cyprus. Sales offices were opened in Mumbai and Buenos Aires and fund administration services were restarted out of Bangalore.
To celebrate our fifteenth anniversary, we decided to do something different. As part of our overall corporate social responsibility (CSR) we created a unique childcare center in Curaçao, Tuma Mi Man. It was very well received and became a success; it also set an example for other companies on the island.
We moved several internal and client accounting functions to India, enabling all other offices to focus on client-facing activities and services.
We opened an office in Santiago and we also opened an office in Warsaw, but despite several attempts to make it work we closed the office two years later. We established a sales office in Vilnius, Lithuania, anda production office for trust activities was established in Auckland, New Zealand.
Just before the end of the year we sold the activities in Copenhagen and Stockholm to the local management.
We opened the Singapore office with a focus on South East Asia. We moved our Internal administration department to Bangalore.
To further expand our footprint in Brazil we opened a sales office in Rio de Janeiro. We also moved into the People’s Republic of China by establishing an office in Guangzhou. Marketing and product development concentrated more and more on emerging markets.
Our Swiss activities were consolidated into one office, closing down the offices in Lugano and Geneva, and opening an office in Zurich.
The Swedish brass-plate office was converted into a full office in November and the combination of a Swedish off ice and Danish office worked well. From this base we further explored other Nordic countries including the Baltic countries.
The Amsterdam office (42 employees) was sold to a private equity investor. We opened a sales office in Mexico City. New products were developed for various Latin American markets and slowly we started to cover all of Latin America, and now also being recognized as a regional specialist.
A brass-plate arrangement was established in Stockholm, Sweden and Singapore. We moved most Group functions from Curaçao and Amsterdam to Barcelona looking for a more central place to have all of our back-office activities come together.
In December of this year we sold Amicorp Funds Services (14 employees) to SS&C Technologies, Inc. and at the same time entering into joint marketing efforts and rendering Amicorp services to SS&C clients.
In September, we opened a representative office in Miami, and another office in Geneva, focused mainly on marketing our services in the French speaking regions of Europe.
We acquired a 25% stock participation in a Hong Kong-based management company, subsequently named Amicorp Hong Kong Limited. We later acquired the remainder of the shares and this became the base for our Hong Kong office.
We celebrated our tenth anniversary by taking all our employees on a teambuilding trip to Southwest Airlines in Dallas Texas.
We established the Amicorp Community Foundation (ACF) in 2001 as a channel to focus our social empowerment efforts, increase environmental consciousness and preserve biodiversity. Amicorp Group contributes up to 1% of its revenues to the ACF.
We opened our own office with our own trust license in Luxembourg and established an office in Lugano, Switzerland. We acquired MeesPierson’s operations in Denmark and integrated them into the Amicorp Denmark A/S operations, making us by far the largest player in this business in Denmark at the time.
We established an operation in Madrid (Spain) under the name Amicorp de España, S.L., which later was converted into a marketing and production office in Barcelona.
We acquired European Trust Services of Amsterdam (ETSA) BV, Conphia Management BV, and Global Management BV and setup our office Amicorp Netherlands BV. Later that year Nomet Management BV was taken over from MeesPierson and integrated into our Amsterdam operations.
In New York we opened a marketing office primarily to market our hedge fund administration services. Our Latin American portfolio and Danish operations both continued to experience growth.
We became the first foreign services provider to offer company and trust management services in Copenhagen, Denmark and also the first to setup an office there.
A representative office was opened in São Paulo (Brazil) to take advantage of the many referrals coming from that country. Having a tax-knowledgeable team on the ground helped us to analyze the ever-changing tax situation in South American countries. We also opened a small office in London to offer services related to bond issues for the Brazilian market.
Amicorp Curaçao received ISO 9002 certification, a first for a financial service provider in the Netherlands Antilles. Our BVI office received a similar certification two years later - the first company of its kind in the BVI to secure it.
We belatedly celebrated our fifth anniversary with all employees going on a behind-the-scenes trip to Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida.
We obtained our first official license in the BVI as a service provider. We immediately started to offer our domiciliation services to other trust companies with no physical presence in the BVI. We experienced strong expansion in Venezuela and Brazil and picked up some important new intermediaries in Europe.
Amicorp obtained its own office building in Curaçao, which tremendously increased our visibility. We experienced rapid growth in our client base, especially in Europe.
Based on changes in legislation we established an office in Kuala Lumpur. Although the product offered worked well, it coincided with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and we were unable to generate enough business to make the office profitable. We transferred most of our clients from Malaysia to Denmark in 1999 and closed the Kuala Lumpur office. Although not a success, the effort put us on the map with many tax advisors in Europe as an innovative and creative service provider.
In 1996 many of our marketing efforts paid off and we significantly increased our client base. We took over the operations of CTF Corporation NV, a Netherlands Antilles management company. This was our first challenge in managing a take-over process and meeting client expectations.
A major benefit was that we gained access to a great number of new intermediaries and sales channels in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.
Significant marketing efforts in Europe resulted in acquiring clients in Switzerland and the Netherlands. We became members of IFA and ITPA. We established several offshore banks for Latin American financial institutions. We also began our first community service projects in Curaçao.
Amicorp Fund Services NV was established as a separate legal entity and we started providing fund administration for US fund managers.
We experienced substantial business setbacks due to the collapse of the Venezuelan financial system and the subsequent loss of most of our Venezuelan clients but achieved stable growth in our other Latin American markets.
To diversify our offerings, we initiated efforts to position Amicorp in the fund administration business. We hired an experienced fund administrator and started doing the administration for small hedge funds.
We setup an operation in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) to offer zero-tax Anglo-Saxon structures to our Latin American clients.
Most of our income was derived from Brazil through the networks of Banco Safra and Bank of Boston. We had access to many of the wealthiest families in Brazil as well as a number of important financial institutions. During this time, we made many trips to Brazil to build up our client base. We still only had two employees.
Operations began October 19, 1992 as Amicorp NV (now Amicorp Curaçao BV) when we provided services to our first Latin America clients. In the same year, we also set up Euro-Trust NV in Aruba. We also started another entity which we believed would be our main activity which we named the Curaçao Securities Exchange Services NV which took 18 years to materialize.
Amicorp is one of the founding members and seat holders in that exchange today, and we helped list several entities on what is now called the Dutch Caribbean Securities Exchange.
