Asset consultants in the local market will be challenged by a new entrant seeking to shake up the gatekeepers of the $2 trillion super industry.
Street Talk can reveal London-headquartered bfinance is in the process of setting up an Australian office and an executive search is understood to be under way. 
Existing players including JANA, Frontier, Mercer, Towers Watson and Russell will be closely monitoring bfinance as it looks at carving out business in their patch.
The timing of the push into Australia also comes amid a greater scrutiny of fee structures in the industry. It will be interesting to see whether local players warm to the different model pitched by bfinance, which it has been presenting in this market for at least two years.
bfinance has already secured several clients and its model typically centres on forming contracts with pension funds and multi-managers to conduct a manager search for a particular mandate. It does this free of charge and conducts a process similar to that of traditional asset consultants. But those who make it to the short-list are asked to enter a contract to provide a certain percentage of their first-year management fee to bfinance if they are successful in winning the work as a one-off payment.
bfinance also has offices in Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Dubai, New York and Montreal, and according to its website advises more than 400 of the world's largest and most sophisticated companies and institutional investors.
In 2009, bfinance successfully completed a management buy-out which saw the exit of the initial private equity backers.
Elsewhere, Westpac Banking Corp's institutional division is understood to have ditched participation and subscription to the well-known industry benchmarking Peter Lee survey. A decision was made late last year following a cost-benefit analysis of the report. It led Westpac, which is on a broader cost-cutting drive, to cut official ties with Peter Lee for its institutional client surveys as the bank wanted to opt for inhouse customer analytics.
Finally, PwC has started a sale process for privately owned company Containerchain. It provides business-to-business, web-based software technology to the shipping industry and has operations spanning Australia, Singapore and Malaysia.
Its clients are freight forwarders, importers, exporters, transport operators, empty container depots and shipping lines. In 2013, Containerchain merged with Asian business MAXimas.
The company was founded in 2007 by Tony Paldano, who has a long history in software for Asian freight logistics. The sale comes at an interesting time given the bidding war for ports and rail group Asciano, and the slated privatisations of ports in Melbourne and Western Australia.