A 28-year-old series trust shop for traditional mutual funds recently entered the ETF business. Watch for them to expand both their team and their client base.

Kip Meadows, CEO of Nottingham, confirms that the Rocky Mount, North Carolina-based firm is now building out an ETF business. The firm already does fund accounting, fund administration, and transfer agency work for open-end mutual funds, hedge funds, and other private funds, and now they've received their SEC exemptive relief and debuted their first two ETFs for their first ETF client.

Meadows has not expanded his team to handle new ETF business, at least not yet.

"We may need to," Meadows tells MFWire. "We're still small and nimble enough that a lot of us wear multiple hats and we kind of enjoy that."

Nottingham currently works with about 160 funds with about $25 billion in assets under administration, from about 50 different firms. To enter the ETF business, they created their own RIA firm, OBP Capital ("OBP" stands for "On Base Percentage"), to get the exemptive relief to be able to create active ETFs.

OBP's first two ETFs, the Fieldstone Merlin Dynamic Large Cap Growth ETF and the Fieldstone UVA Unconstrained Medium-Term Fixed Income ETF, both debuted in August. Nottingham and OBP created the ETFs for Fieldstone, a wealth management firm, and brought in Merlin Capital and Universal Value Advisors as subadvisors. The two funds have brought in about $30 million each so far.

"They've done well kind of getting out of the gates," Meadows says.

Watch for Meadows and his team to work with more firms on launching ETFs.

"We have several conversations going but nothing ready to hit the street yet," Meadows says. 

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