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Appearances in London's West End have been deceptive of late. The quiet old facades of fund company offices, tucked away in side-streets or leafy squares, have hidden the financial earthquake that has passed through them and, in some cases, left bankruptcy or restructuring in its wake.

One of the least damaged of these boutiques has been Thames River Capital – in fact, this year's tremors have grown its assets under management further. Its main advantage has been its traditional hedge fund and fund of hedge funds business, which has not taken excessive risk or blown up in the face of its investors.

Cautious clients now use it to access absolute returns, which the retail market is also chasing to keep up with the crisis. Multi-managers such as Tony Lanning at Gartmore Investment Management are already converts to the Thames River Multi Hedge investment trust, whose NAV gained 18.6 per cent over one year to 30 June.

As the turmoil continues, Michael Warren, investment director at Thames River, sees employees at larger and more troubled institutions fleeing for investment management boutiques such as his, or in some cases starting their own. "Sometimes it takes that reality check to provide the trigger and make you want to run your own business," he shrugs.

Mr Warren and a number of colleagues left Baring Asset Management under similar circumstances after Barings collapsed and re-branded. "It's quite hard watching a parent company going bust. We were all a bit fed up and needed a new challenge."

That challenge quickly became Thames River Capital. Mr Warren and chief executive Charlie Porter have now been there since they started it with colleagues in 1998. Now as the decade draws to a close, Mr Warren sees a similar process repeating itself at other enterprises. "We'll see quite a few fund managers knocking on our doors again," he claims.

On the retail side, Thames River still has plenty to do to develop its retail business. One of its top priorities is to hire a UK equity team, traditionally the most lucrative staple in the domestic market. But Mr Warren is in no rush to hire what might be the wrong people. Nor is Thames River a public firm with shareholders pushing it to do so.

"It allows us to take a long-term view. The big company thing is to put a timetable on it and hire a headhunter. That by definition will not get you the best team. It'll get you the best team that's around at that moment."

One of the crucial questions for Thames River when hiring managers is whether they will fit into the culture of the business. But once they have cleared that hurdle, team leaders can run their operations as they see fit.

"Each team is free to structure itself in a way that is appropriate for them. In a big organisation, you'd be arguing with your chief investment officer about it," Mr Warren says.

No statistic demonstrates this more graphically than the number of people Thames River has working on each of its funds. On average, there are two-and-a-half investment professionals for each portfolio, or 89 for 36 funds. In the long-only multi-manager business, five employees work on seven products. In the multi-manager hedge team, there are nine employees on 10.

But in the Nevsky emerging markets team under Martin Taylor, 34 staff work on just four porfolios. In global credit, the ratio is almost as high, with 15 staff on just two. Mr Warren says this demonstrates flexible spending as well as asset allocation.

"Martin's belief is that an analyst cannot cover more than 25-30 companies. As they've expanded their universe, they've had to employ more analysts. They now do developed market equities where there’s an emerging market bias. If you're looking at an emerging bank, you need to see it in the context of the global banking system."

Like some other global fund houses, Thames River also bases its investment teams in one city so this context is easily available. "All the fund managers will always be in London," Mr Warren says.

What complicates the situation from the UK perspective is that currently many of their funds are domiciled in Ireland. "Our previous history was that we were comfortable with Dublin-based funds. When we were at Barings, we had a Dublin range and we were very familiar with the regulation," he explains.

This arrangement helps Thames River with its international distribution, but it has proved a stumbling block in getting funds onto UK fund supermarkets and wraps. Mr Warren observes the biggest problem is proving demand for the funds exists, even for the acclaimed Nevsky Global Emerging Markets product, which is currently on no platforms in the UK. "I'm sure IFAs read about these funds quite regularly, but they can’t access them."

Although the investment director says the top-100 players in the market have always supported Thames River, the firm only broke into the mass IFA market in the last 12 months with the launch of five onshore multi-manager products for ex-Credit Suisse managers Gary Potter and Rob Burdett. "The multi-manager products were the ones to do this with because they are suited to the mass IFA market that do not have research teams."

The pair's move across from Credit Suisse was not wholly straightforward, however. Mr Warren says Thames River was unable to move all the assets it would have liked from their Credit Suisse portfolios to their new ones. Just as they did at Credit Suisse in 2001, Mr Potter and Mr Burdett also launched into difficult market conditions. Thames River’s traditional multi-manager assets now total just £51m.

Mr Warren says this is connected to an extent with market conditions, but admits he would have liked the figure to have been higher. "You have got to go and meet people. IFAs might have met Gary and Rob in their previous lives, but they want to meet them in their new lives," he observes. "The five-year target is to build a business north of £1bn. After three years you'd want to be halfway there."

The crisis has affected multi-manager less than other retail asset classes, however, so outperforming managers may still have a chance to gather assets. And as Thames River's funds of hedge funds prove popular with private client managers, Mr Warren eagerly awaits the regulator's thoughts on Faifs next year.