The fallout from the Bernie Madoff scandal has proved to be a boon for a Rocky Mount financial services company.
Nottingham Investment Administration provides a bevy of services -- including accounting and portfolio record-keeping -- for mutual funds, hedge funds, governments and foundations. After Madoff bilked investors of more than $50 billion, hedge funds that had been doing their own accounting in-house discovered that would no longer fly with investors, said founder and CEO Kip Meadows.
"Now, an investor says to the hedge fund, 'If you are doing your own accounting, I don't even want to talk to you,'" said Meadows. "The big buzz word is transparency post-Madoff."
The upshot is that Nottingham's roster of hedge fund clients has doubled to about 50 in the past two years. That, along with increased business from existing clients, boosted the company's 2009 revenue more than 20 percent last year to $7 million. Meadows anticipates similar growth this year.
The 24-year-old business also has added 10 or so employees in the past two years, pushing its total past 50, and is continuing to hire.
"I'm kind of glad to have been able to do that at a time when eastern North Carolina has got pretty well into double-digits in unemployment," said Meadows, a Rocky Mount native.
Nottingham works mostly with small and mid-sized mutual funds and hedge funds. In the fund administration industry, "we're probably the biggest of the small firms," said Meadows.
