All Strategically Speaking articles – Page 2
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InterviewsNewton’s Euan Munro: Seeking the best of both worlds
Euan Munro has built a formidable reputation in asset management, developing a major multi-asset absolute return strategy at Standard Life Asset Management in the 2000s. But the fortunes of his once mighty Global Absolute Return Strategy (GARS), now managed by Abrdn, have wavered as multi-asset strategies have fallen out of favour.
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InterviewsMirova’s Philippe Zaouati: realistically optimistic
Asset management CEOs tend to be a clever bunch, but there cannot be many who are familiar with the work of Antonio Gramsci, the 20th century Italian socialist philosopher.
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Features17Capital’s Pierre-Antoine de Selancy: Navigating NAV lending
Pierre-Antoine de Selancy has just left a meeting with his company’s new majority shareholder, Oaktree, and is running a little late. His days are busy. De Selancy is founder and managing partner of 17Capital, a London-based boutique specialised in providing NAV finance to private equity managers.
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FeaturesLGIM’s Michelle Scrimgeour: ambitions for growth
Michelle Scrimgeour and her executive team set out their strategic growth priorities in November 2020, a little more than a year after she had taken over as CEO of Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM). They agreed to grow the business by focusing on existing strengths: to modernise, diversify and to internationalise.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Italian, global and poised for growth
In asset management, three years can be a short or a long time, depending on many factors, including market conditions. To some asset management executives, the second half of the 2010s perhaps felt like an endless slog, due to the intense competition for market share and outperformance within the seemingly never-ending bull market. The first two years of the new decade have certainly elapsed more quickly, thanks to the historical significance of the events that have occurred.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Jose Minaya, Nuveen
Asset managers with a yield-hungry pension investor as a parent nowadays usually have to diversify their footprint into private markets, often by acquisitions in one form or another.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Edwin Conway, BlackRock Alternative Investors
Many asset owners focus on the return streams available from private markets investments and the diversification effect of private equity, debt or any of the other flavours available in this sector of the market.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Sandro Pierri, BNP Paribas Asset Management
Like many of his counterparts at large asset management firms, Sandro Pierri is mindful of how global trends are influencing his clients and the best ways for his firm to address them.
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FeaturesStrategically speaking interview: Redwheel’s new CEO
Last August, RWC Partner’s chief executive Dan Mannix left the company, and the head of business development, Tord Stallvik took over. Soon afterwards, the company rebranded as Redwheel – RWC was an acronym for Red Wheel Capital.
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FeaturesStrategically speaking – WTW: Democratising private markets
WTW’s ill-fated merger with Aon, announced at the outset of the pandemic in early March 2020, would have shaken up the corporate insurance brokerage market. It would also have created an outsourced CIO (OCIO) giant to compete with Mercer in terms of delegated assets under management (AUM).
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FeaturesStrategically speaking: Eyes on the next frontier
“Riddle me this,” asks Yves Choueifaty, founder, president and CIO of French asset manager TOBAM. “Why would 70 people who are not TOBAM employees be at our Paris headquarters today?”
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FeaturesStrategically speaking – AlbaCore Capital: Alternative credit with pension fund roots
AlbaCore Capital, a Europe-based alternative credit specialist with North American roots, is a fairly rare example of an asset management company that was spun off from a pension fund. David Allen, founder and CIO, established the company in 2016, with a team of European alternative credit specialists that he led from within the $542bn (€366bn) Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).
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FeaturesStrategically speaking: IFM Investors
When IFM Investors and its fellow consortium members cracked open the bubbly last month on their successful bid for Sydney Airport following a third revised offer, it marked a bet on a vigorous and sustained recovery in passenger aviation. After all, airports globally, including Sydney, had come to resemble “parking lots for planes”, in the words of IFM Investors CEO David Neal.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking: Finreon
Established 12 years ago as a spin-off from Switzerland’s renowned University of St Gallen, Finreon is a quant asset management specialist that styles itself as an investment adviser and a think tank. It has recently weighed into the debate on portfolio decarbonisation with a novel solution for listed equities.
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FeaturesStrategically Speaking: Aviva Investors
Insurance-owned asset managers can be difficult to pigeonhole. Some have forged strong specialisms, often in fixed income, but now also in alternatives like property or niche credit. Others have remained a corporate backwater absorbed by group general-account assets.
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FeaturesStrategically speaking: Goldman Sachs Asset Management
If you are a pension fund, insurer or sovereign wealth fund and you haven’t heard from Goldman Sachs already, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that they want to talk to you – about a variety of alternative investment opportunities they want to put your way as a potential debt or equity fund investor, co-investor or all three.
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FeaturesStrategically speaking: Lyxor & Amundi
Lyxor has made a mark over the 20-plus years of its existence, pioneering managed accounts for hedge funds, including the first dedicated institutional managed account platform, that it created for PGGM in 2010.
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FeaturesStrategically speaking: Hayfin – no hayseed
Europe’s abortive football super league didn’t collapse from want of loan capital this April. It collapsed, instead, because of a catastrophic lack of cultural fit with the ethos of the sport.
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InterviewsStrategically Speaking: Cardano
The central argument of the 2015 documentary ‘Boom, bust, boom’, which features several high-profile experts including Nobel laureates Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller and Daniel Kahneman, is that financial crises are natural events caused by human nature.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking: Allianz Global Investors
Allianz Global Investors (AGI) has long invested in green infrastructure. The market, and the perception of renewable energy for investors in particular, has changed during this time. Investors are ready to engage with renewable energy or cleantech if the underlying technology has a proven track record.
