-
Business Consulting
Our Consulting team guarantees quick turnarounds, lower partner-to-staff ratio than most and superior results delivered on a range of services.
-
Business Risk Services
Our Business Risk Services team deliver practical and pragmatic solutions that support clients in growing and protecting the inherent value of their businesses.
-
Corporate Finance
Our experienced Corporate Finance team has provided a range of transaction, valuation, deal advisory and restructuring services to clients for the past two decades.
-
Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
-
Digital Transformation
Our Digital Transformation team work with business leaders to deliver efficient digital strategies and operating models that provide new or enhanced capabilities.
-
Forensic Accounting
Our Forensic and Investigation Services team have targeted solutions to solve difficult challenges - making the difference between finding the truth or being left in the dark.
-
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting framework that helps teams, individuals and organisations set and track measurable goals.
-
People and Change Consulting
Our People & Change Consulting team help clients adapt to the changing nature of the workforce - how they attract, retain, engage, develop, deploy and lead their people.
-
Restructuring
Grant Thornton is Ireland’s leading provider of insolvency and corporate recovery solutions.
-
Outsourced Payroll
Our outsourced payroll teams become your dedicated payroll department, aiming to process your payroll in the most cost effective and compliant manner.
-
Outsourcing
Grant Thornton's reliable and cost-effective outsourcing services help you streamline your business operations by taking care of your workload.
-
Audit and Accounting Advisory
Our Audit and Accounting Advisory team takes the headache out of multi-jurisdictional audit compliance requirements as well as technical compliance with accounting standards and legislation for clients.
-
Business Process Outsourcing
Grant Thornton’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) team serves the needs of rapidly growing mid-tier multinationals operating out of Ireland and other hubs through the provision of services across the full range of finance functions.
-
Flexible People Solutions
At Grant Thornton, our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) department have a dedicated team that help finance functions maximise efficiency.
-
Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions
Our Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions service offering covers a full suite of compliance services including financial statement preparation and related filings, dual bookkeeping, direct and indirect tax, statistical returns and payroll.
-
Global Payroll Solutions
At Grant Thornton, we meet the challenges of our clients. Our Global payroll compliance service offering is tailored to meet all your payroll requirements through a single point of contact.
-
Actuarial
Our Actuarial team provides a comprehensive range of services to our insurance clients. From regulatory support for compliance to delivering specialist expertise in insurance & reinsurance.
-
Data Analytics
Our team helps to unlock the potential of data analytics within your organisation, allowing you to be more innovative, efficient and customer-centric than ever before.
-
Digital and Fintech
Our FinTech team are experts in technology and financial services and have a long track record of helping companies achieve sustained advantage.
-
Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
-
Financial Services Audit
Our Financial Services Audit team offers expertise and knowledge along with a horizontal approach to solving clients’ problems and queries.
-
Financial Services Consulting
We work closely with clients to understand their strategy and benchmark their performance against the very best international standards.
-
Financial Services Tax
Grant Thornton Ireland has a team of over 100 tax professionals providing advice to a diverse range of clients in the Financial Services sector.
-
FS Business Risk Services
Our FS Business Risk team have real experience of the financial services sector, through working within regulatory bodies or holding leadership positions in Risk, Compliance and Internal Audit functions.
-
Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustees Limited
The Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustee service can offer business owners, directors and employees the opportunity to manage their own retirement choices with full transparency.
-
Pension Audit
The Grant Thornton Pension Audit team has vast experience in managing schemes and preparing annual reports on them for clients.
-
Prudential Risk
Our industry leading Prudential Risk team works with clients on a range of areas including regulatory reporting, regulatory authorisations, on-site investigations and data quality assurance.
-
Quantitative Risk
Our Quantitative Risk team members bring a wide range of experience with many of them having backgrounds in banking, investment markets, regulation, professional practice, and academia.
-
Sustainability desk
We recognise that businesses are operating at different levels of maturity when it comes to sustainability, and pride ourselves on working with our clients to develop bespoke solutions to their needs.
-
Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS)
Our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) team designs and implements creative solutions for organisations expanding into new markets or undertaking functional financial transformations.
-
Grant Thornton Financial Counselling
Grant Thornton Financial Counselling (GTFC) comprises a team of highly qualified professionals who offer financial advice to individuals and corporates across a range of areas including savings, investments, pension planning, and inheritance and succession planning.
-
Inheritance Planning
Our services on Inheritance Planning mirror those on Succession Planning whereby the foundations of the plan are derived from meaningful conversations with those that wish to pass on or protect their asset base.
-
Personal Tax Compliance & Planning
The Grant Thornton Personal Tax team helps clients remain compliant and up to date with all of their tax obligations whilst ensuring that they are solutions driven and manage their finances in the most tax efficient way possible.
-
Succession Planning
We have extensive experience guiding our clients successfully through the succession process. This involves advice on both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the process. While there is a business at the core of each succession plan we advise on, it is all predicated on understanding the people and their respective wishes.
-
Company Secretarial
Grant Thornton’s Company Secretarial team contains qualified Company Secretaries. Clients are assured that they will meet all of their obligations under the Companies Acts and other relevant legislation and regulations.
-
Corporation Tax
Our Corporation Tax team is made up of more than 40 highly experienced senior partners and directors who work directly with a wide range of domestic, international, and financial services clients. We place a strong emphasis on direct service to clients and we pride ourselves on the close personal relationships we build and the deep understanding of their businesses we develop
-
Employer Solutions
Attracting and retaining key talent, managing employment costs and ensuring compliance with complex tax rules presents one of the most serious challenges today for many businesses. You need to ensure that your business complies with increasingly complex tax legislation and can adapt to updated Revenue guidance in a cost-effective way and we are here to help.
-
Financial Services Tax
The Grant Thornton team is made up of experts who are fully up to date in terms of changing and evolving tax legislation. This is combined with industry expertise and an in-depth knowledge of the evolving financial services regulatory landscape.
-
Global Mobility Services
Grant Thornton Ireland offer a different approach to managing global mobility. We have brought together specialists from our tax, global payroll, people and change and financial accounting teams across Ireland and Northern Ireland, while drawing on the knowledge and insights of our global network of over 143 offices of mobility professionals to provide you with a holistic approach to managing global mobility.
-
International Tax
We develop close relationships with clients in order to gain a deep understanding of their businesses to ensure they make the right operational decisions. The wrong decision on how a company sells into a new market or establishes a new subsidiary can have major tax implications.
-
Tax Advisory
The Grant Thornton Tax Advisory team blends commercial experience and knowledge with tax expertise to advise clients on the full range of transactions including sales, mergers, restructurings and succession planning.
-
Tax Incentives
Our Tax Incentives team help clients access vital cash funding and tax incentives to enable them to achieve their growth ambition.
-
Transfer Pricing
Our Transfer Pricing team has extensive experience across all industries. They can assist clients in overcoming challenges and deliver sector specific, sustainable solutions.
-
VAT
Grant Thornton’s team of indirect tax specialists helps a range of clients across a variety of sectors including pharmaceuticals, financial services, construction and property and food to navigate these complexities.
-
Real Estate Tax Advisory
The Irish real estate market has experienced considerable change in recent years. This has resulted in the emergence of a number of challenges for investors, but has also brought about significant opportunities. With this in mind, taxation is now more than ever one of the key factors for real estate investors when appraising investments, financing methods and development structuring.
One of the key priorities for the 2019 ESMA Supervisory Convergence Work Programme was ensuring supervisory convergence regarding performance fee structures as part of the programme, on 16 July 2019, ESMA published a Consultation Paper (CP) 2 on the proposed draft Guidelines. The consultation closed on 31 October 2019 with the final report issued on the matter on 3 April 2020. The report also contained the guidelines. It was noted in the report that once the Guidelines with the report are translated into the official EU languages and published on the ESMA websites, the National Competent Authorities will have two months to Notify ESMA whether they comply or intend to comply with the guidelines.
ESMA's Guidelines on performance fee in UCITS and certain types of AIFs (the “Guidelines”) were formally published on its website on 5 November 2020.
Scope
The Guidelines apply to Managers and National Competent Authorities. The Guidelines cover the following:
Timelines
The Guidelines will become applicable two months from the date of publication of the Guidelines on ESMA website in all EU official languages, which would mean 5 January 2021 (applicable date).
Where Managers are launching new funds that are in scope of these Guidelines after the applicable date or are introducing a performance fee for the first time to their existing funds that are in scope after the applicable date, the Guidelines would be applicable immediately for those funds.
Managers managing funds that are in scope and which had some sort of performance fee methodology in place have six months from the applicable date to comply with the Guidelines.
Guidelines
The Guidelines cover the following broad categories:
Key provision of the Guidelines are noted below:
Guideline 1 – Performance fee calculation method
The calculation of a performance fee should be verifiable and not open to the possibility of manipulation.
The performance fee calculation method should include, at least, the following elements:
- the reference indicator to measure the relative performance of the fund (e.g. Index, a HWM, a hurdle rate or a combination of these);
- the crystallisation frequency;
- the performance reference period;
- the performance fee rate;
- the performance fee methodology defining the method for the calculation of the performance fees based on the abovementioned inputs and any other relevant inputs; and
- the computation frequency which should coincide with the calculation frequency of the NAV.
The performance fee calculation method should ensure performance fees are always proportionate to the investment performance. Artificial increases due to new subscriptions should not be taken into account.
Managers need to demonstrate alignment of investors’ interest to the performance fee model and the reasonability of the incentive it receives.
Guideline 2 – Consistency between the performance fee model and the fund’s investment objectives, strategy and policy
The manager should implement and maintain a process in order to demonstrate and periodically review that the performance fee model is consistent with the fund’s investment objectives, strategy and policy.
When assessing the consistency between the performance fee model and the fund’s investment objectives, strategy and policy, the manager should check:
As a general principle, if a fund is managed in reference to a benchmark index and it employs a performance fee model based on a benchmark index, the two indices should be the same. This includes the case of:
- Performance objective of the fund is linked to a reference benchmark; and
- Holdings of the fund is based on the underlying holdings of a reference benchmark.
In cases where the fund is managed in reference to a benchmark but the fund’s portfolio holdings are not based upon the holdings of the benchmark index, the benchmark used for the portfolio composition should be consistent with the benchmark used for the calculation of the performance fee.
Consistency of the benchmark should be assessed by the manager based on the following parameters:
- expected return;
- investment universe;
- beta exposure to an underlying asset class;
- geographical exposure;
- sector exposure;
- income distribution of the fund;
- liquidity measures;
- duration;
- credit rating category; and
- volatility and/or historical volatility.
If the reference indicator changes during the reference period, the performance of the reference indicator for this period should be calculated by linking the benchmark index that was previously in force until the date of the change and the new reference indicator used afterwards.
Guideline 3 – Frequency for the crystallisation of the performance fee
Performance fee crystallisation and payment should ensure alignment of managers’ and investors’ interests and fair treatment of investors.
The crystallisation frequency should not be more than once a year. This however will not be applicable where the fund employs a high water-mark model or a high-on-high model where the performance reference period is equal to the whole life of the fund.
The crystallisation date should be the same for all share classes of a fund that levies a performance fee.
Guideline 4 – Negative performance (loss) recovery
A performance fee should only be payable for positive performance during the reference period. Any underperformance or loss previously incurred during the performance reference period should be recovered before a performance fee becomes payable.
In cases where the fund has outperformed the reference benchmark index but had a negative performance, a performance fee could be charged as long as a prominent warning to the investor is provided.
Performance fee models should be designed to ensure that the manager is not incentivised to take excessive risks and also should ensure that the time horizon for Manager’s incentive remuneration should be as far as possible, consistent with the recommended investor’s holding period.
Performance fee models based on a benchmark index, should be ensure that any underperformance of the fund compared to the benchmark is clawed back before any performance fee becomes payable. To this purpose, the length of the performance reference period, if this is shorter than the whole life of the fund, should be set equal to at least 5 years.
For HWM models, a performance fee should be payable only where, during the reference period, the new HWM exceeds the last HWM. In case the performance reference period is shorter than the whole life of the fund, the performance reference period should be set equal to at least five years on a rolling basis. In this case, performance fee may only be claimed if the outperformance exceeds any underperformances during the previous five years and performance fees should not crystallise more than once a year.
Guideline 5 - Disclosure of the performance fee model
The prospectus and any relevant information documents (including marketing materials), should clearly set out all information necessary to enable investors to understand properly the performance fee model and the computation methodology. These documents should clearly note the performance fee calculation method, with specific reference to parameters and the crystallisation and payment.
The prospectus should indicate all main elements of the performance fee calculation as noted in Guideline 1. It should also include concrete examples of the performance fee calculation providing investors with a better understanding of the performance fee model especially where the performance fee model allows for performance fees to be charged even in case of negative performance.
For performance fee methodologies that compute performance fee with reference to a different but consistent benchmark (see Guideline 2), the choice of benchmark should be explained in the prospectus.
The KIID should clearly set out all information necessary to explain the existence of the performance fee, the basis on which the fee is charged and when the fee applies.
KIID should clearly note a prominent warning for cases where in times of negative performance, performance fee may be payable if the fund outperforms the reference benchmark.
Both KIID and prospectus should clearly identify the benchmark index used in the calculation of performance fee if applicable and show past performance against it.
The annual and half-yearly reports and any other ex-post information should indicate, for each applicable share class the following:
- the actual amount of performance fees charged; and
- the percentage of the fees based on the share class NAV.