Mr Denis Curran remembers well when Bank of Ireland Asset Management (BIAM) got its first client in the United States. It was in 1991, shortly after he left the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) to join BIAM, which was setting up in the US to offer an investment service for US funds seeking to invest in foreign stocks.

The client was Brockton city in Massachusetts, the sum involved was $1 million and the deal was driven by Irish-American connections.

Today, BIAM manages a portfolio of $22.9 billion (#26.8 billion) for US pension funds, endowments and corporations, including $4 billion in new contracts last year. The minimum account BIAM handles is $20 million and several accounts exceed $1 billion. The biggest client, a large public fund, has entrusted BIAM with $2.5 billion.

From a standing start, BIAM has grown to the point where it has 250 North American clients in 38 states. They range from the Teachers' Retirement System of New York to the Shell Oil Company and the Screen Actors' Guild. Mr Curran's operation has expanded to include a staff of 44 in four North American offices, in New York, Santa Monica, Chicago and Montreal. The actual investments are done in Dublin, where Mr Chris Reilly is the chief stock picker.

"We rank fifth in size of assets managed for international securities in the United States, which is pretty phenomenal coming from no place 10 years ago," said Mr Curran, a native of Willowfield Drive in East Belfast where, he said, he learned a lot of his "street smarts". "Our compound growth rate is 50 per cent plus in the last nine years, that's assets, performance and new business we bring in." BIAM was registered in the US in 1987 by Mr William Cotter, now BIAM (US) chief executive, and Mr Denis Donovan.

"They carpetbagged from Ireland for a couple of years, and the city of Brockton first gave them $1 million, which seemed like an enormous amount of money at the time," said Mr Curran, interviewed in his office in Greenwich, Connecticut. "It was an Irish-American connection and in fact some of our early money came from Massachusetts through Irish-American connections. Now it is not even 5 per cent. Seventyfive per cent of our business is controlled through consultants whom the funds would hire."

The timing for targeting the US was good. In the 1990s restrictions on foreign investments were lifted and US pension plans increased their international exposure from 3 to 14 per cent. But one of the initial problems was convincing clients that BIAM was a serious player, and that it was autonomous and not a traditionally conservative bank trust department.

"Who were we? Ireland? Financial services?" said Mr Curran, expressing the doubts of the US investment community. But the Republic's image was changing, helped by an IDA campaign to promote the State's education level. This was so effective that "people told me that Ireland has a wonderful education system, people who wouldn't know Ireland from a hole in the wall".

Clients of BIAM (US) come looking for style, performance, professionalism, experience and consistency, he said.

Managers of US funds typically set aside 15 to 20 per cent to invest in non-US equities, while the rest goes into different asset classes such as treasuries, liquid securities, international bonds, emerging markets, venture capital and hedge funds. They will expect a long-term rate of return and are not disturbed by temporary setbacks, so long as "everybody sticks to their knitting".

The style of BIAM is value management. "A value manager in its purest theoretical form would be where you just buy stocks because the price is very low. You are buying dogs in the street but you are buying them because you do a fundamental analysis and you are looking at the price of a stock and you are saying that it does not reflect the future earnings stream that you see coming from it.

"There are times, usually when markets are driven by sentiment, where value is out of favour and there were a couple of years with the tech and the internet and the dotcom when all the money poured into growth stocks, but that's a different style of investing."

The dotcom stocks were never BIAM's "cup of tea". If they had invested in them for the sake of having a better year "we'd be fired because we would be disturbing their planned mix rather that sticking with what they hired us for, even though we had negative performance. One of the reasons for our success, and we're constantly being hired by much more sophisticated investors now than we were eight years ago, is because they have observed the consistency of our style and the consistency of the risk-adjusted performance."

Value managers, he explained, go out "and kick the tyres and look under the hood. We are an old-economy type, basically old-fashioned, conservative investor that must see visible earnings before we can purchase stock. We typically hold a stock for three or four years on average. "We tend to be invested in very large, well-established companies that, for whatever reason, we believe are mispriced at that point in time. I call it the S&P 500 of the rest of the industrialised world. We would buy and sell [stocks in] companies like Nestle. Six years ago we bought it, we made a lot of money on it, we sold it again when it got to what we thought was a fully invested price, then we bought it again about a year ago."

BIAM has avoided emerging markets, sticking instead to OECD countries. It's 10 top holdings are in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain and France. "There isn't a marketplace in the world where we are not well ahead of our benchmark on a long-time basis," said Mr Curran. "In deciding what countries to invest in we're driven by liquidity, liquidity, liquidity and well-regulated markets."

These have been testing times for asset managers as stocks underperform around the globe. The way of assessing BIAM's performance is the EAFE (Europe, Australasia and the Far East) index, a Morgan Stanley survey that tracks leading stocks in 20 developed countries outside North America. EAFE is followed closely by financial institutions in the US that invest money abroad. BIAM in the US reported a fall in performance of minus 21.29 per cent in the year ending March 31st but, Mr Curran pointed out, the EAFE index fared much worse, falling by minus 25.67 per cent.

Since its inception in 1987, Bank of Ireland Asset Management in the US has beaten the EAFE index consistently, he said. Over a 10year period its investments have shown a return of 12.43 per cent compared to EAFE's 6.2 per cent.

"Ours is a long-term strategy so investors wouldn't judge us on a quarter but over three years, five years, seven years, 10 years," Mr Curran stated. "We have out-performed against the EAFE index over three years by 3.5 per cent and in the longer term by as much as 6 per cent."

"We're judged against how we perform against our peer group, not only in absolute terms but on risk-adjusted terms. The significant thing is that, over any period of time, we are basically in the top 25 per cent on a return per unit of risk taken. That's terribly important to them."

He added: "We were so under-rated for so long, people didn't take us seriously, and suddenly, wham bam! We're big business."