THE CHIEF of the largest fund management firm in Ireland, Pioneer Investment Management, has called on the Government to proceed quickly with plans mooted in 2006 to develop a global finance academy to provide top-level training for investment professionals.

Rob Richardson, whose company manages €110 billion in assets from its Dublin office and employs 150 investment professionals among its 550 staff, said the requirement for such a centre, given the scale of Ireland's financial sector, was of equal importance to national infrastructure projects.

"We would like to see a bigger pipeline of people coming out of master's and PhD programmes in Ireland," he said.

Stating that Bertie Ahern when taoiseach had supported the establishment of a centre for financial skills two years ago, he said the initiative "hasn't moved as quickly as we would like".

Crucial to such a plan was the recruitment of top-tier finance academics, who are in demand throughout the world and who command high salaries as a result.

Mr Richardson said the Irish university system currently produced only one or two "really good" master's graduates in finance a year and pointed out that institutions such as the London Business School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania were each capable of producing 20 to 30 graduates at that level every year.

The investment required in Ireland was in the region of €25-€50 million for a multi-year programme, he said. Acknowledging that the payback from a dedicated centre would not be immediate, he said it would assist the effort to upgrade the level of work carried out in the financial sector.

"We could at various [master's level] disciplines . . . go from one to two really great graduate candidates to 20."

A similar increase in the number of second-tier candidates was also likely, he said, adding that such a centre would be equally capable of producing a "single-digit" number of PhD graduates.

This would reduce the requirement for firms to recruit abroad for Irish operations, cutting costs significantly through the creation of bigger pipeline of domestic candidates for high-level jobs and fostering a co-ordinated programme of applied research with industry, Mr Richardson said.