The move builds on connections between the Gulf and the subsidiary's existing APAC base.

Investor services group IQ-EQ said yesterday that its subsidiary Gordian Capital has achieved regulatory approval to expand its institutional cross-border fund platform and fund solutions offering into Dubai. Gordian has also been granted an endorsement to its licence to use a fund platform.

The offering will be handled via Gordian’s new office at the Dubai International Financial Centre.

Gordian has built a “corridor” between its established Asia-Pacific base and the Gulf, IQ-EQ said, using a metaphor that has been employed by banks, wealth managers and others to describe trade and financial links, as noted in this article.

Gordian, which manages $22 billion, is Asia’s “first and largest institutional cross-border fund platform and fund solutions provider,” with offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Melbourne, IQ-EQ said. 

Services that can be offered within or from the DIFC include managing a collective investment fund; advising on financial products; arranging custody; arranging deals in investments; and managing assets.

When IQ-EQ acquired Gordian in July 2025, it enabled the group to offer regulated market entry into APAC on top of its existing regulated fund platforms in France, Luxembourg, Ireland and the UK. Since 2005, Gordian has launched over 115 funds across both private and public strategies. Its clients include global institutional asset managers, multi-strategy platforms, family offices, hedge funds and corporates across private equity, real estate, venture capital, infrastructure, hedge and long-only strategies.

“When our clients go cross-border, regionally and/or globally, it can have its challenges – in terms of speed to market and cost as well as meeting rigorous initial and ongoing operational and regulatory standards,” Mark Voumard, Gordian founder and managing director and head of fund platform and solutions, Asia and Middle East at IQ-EQ, said. “Leveraging Gordian’s 20 years’ experience in APAC, and now as part of the global IQ-EQ group, we can provide a highly-regulated market-entry pathway and infrastructure for institutional GPs and managers seeking to establish a regulated presence in DIFC.”

Such corridors can help shape businesses’ strategy on where to deploy people and other resources, for example hiring bankers fluent in local languages and with specific experience to work in one end of a corridor, perhaps sometimes swapping with a colleague to gain experience in the other end. Private banking remains, in some ways, a career that involves travel and a willingness to move around.