NBCC were pleased to interview Mark Weil, CEO of TMF Group.

TMF Group is the leading provider of critical administrative services, helping clients invest and operate safely worldwide.

Their work includes helping companies of all sizes with business services such as HR and payroll, accounting and tax, corporate secretarial, global governance and administration and fiduciary services for structured finance, private equity and real estate investments.

Can you tell us about TMF Group?

We are a Dutch company founded 30 years ago. We help companies invest and operate safely around the world, making sure that they follow local rules. With around 10,000 people and 120 offices in 85 jurisdictions worldwide, we provide accounting, tax, payroll, fund administration and legal entity management services essential to global business compliance.
We have an amazing client base including 60% of the Fortune Global 500 and FTSE 100, and almost half the top 300 private equity firms. We are now recognised as a world leader in our space.

What is special about the company? Why might a client want to come to you for help?

Most multinationals have a long tail of locations where they lack scale and where the rules for doing business are complex. Get it wrong and they face big headaches, service disruption and fines. They mainly solve that with lots of different local firms. We give them a single, high-quality, global partner for all of those locations or, as my Dutch colleagues might put it more directly, we give them a single throat to choke.

How big is the NL - UK market for you?

We’re broadly spread around the world, both in terms of where our clients come from and where we support them. Around 40% of our clients have a North America HQ and most of our work is in places like Latin America, Central Europe and Asia. So while NL and UK do matter for us, they are more a source of management talent and clients for us than critical markets where we do work.

What are some of the market challenges TMF Group are currently facing and how are you overcoming these?

Our challenge isn’t particularly finding work to do. As long as we can provide clients with flawless service, they’ll give us more to do regardless of what’s going on with the economy - what we do is essential, recurring work and the regulatory burden is only increasing. Our biggest challenge is finding the right talents to do the work given how heated labour markets have become. So I spend a lot of my time working on the employee proposition. If TMF Group works well for our people, it’ll work well for our clients, and if it works well for our clients, it’ll work well for our shareholders.

Why did you join NBCC?

I’m a Brit running a Dutch company and have really enjoyed the experience. What we’ve had to do to transform TMF Group over the last few years would have been much harder with any other combination of cultures I can think of. So I’ve come to value the partnership I have every day with my mainly anglo-dutch management team, seeing how aligned our ways of thinking are. That makes me realise how valuable co-operation between the two countries can be and which I see the NBCC encouraging.

What are your plans for future growth that you can share with NBCC members?

We are in pretty well all the countries where our clients need us to be. So our main focus is on helping them with emerging needs, for example, ESG reporting which the EU is making a mandatory requirement. We’ll have grown revenue by around 15% in 2022 mainly by doing more for our existing clients. We’ll keep that going, complemented by acquisitions mainly in the Americas and AsiaPac to strengthen our position there.

We’re also about to bring in new shareholders alongside CVC Capital Partners. That will include ADIA (the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority) as well as six other blue chip sovereign wealth funds and asset managers from North America, the Middle East and Asia. That gives us fantastic sponsorship and reach into the fastest-growing economies in the world.

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