Asset Managers

Joseph Pinto will join M&G Asset Management in March as its new chief executive officer, the international savings and investment firm said.

Pinto joins from Natixis Investment Managers and succeeds Jack Daniels who announced his retirement last summer following 21 years of service. At Natixis Pinto served as head of distribution and investment solutions for Europe, Asia and Latin America and as global chief operating Officer.

Regulatory uncertainty that the industry is contending with as a result of the complex range of interacting legal requirements, Efama, the EU’s main trade body for asset management, said. Luxembourg’s Alfi argued that “the element of intent” needs to be considered when making judgements on greenwashing.

With economic growth slowing down in all three of the world’s major economies, investors are best advised to opt for the geographical region with the least messy outlook, leading international economist Mohammed El-Erian has told a Nordic conference. “The cleanest dirty shirt is in the US.”

The EU Packaged Retail Investment and Insurance Products (Priips) regulation is set to take effect across the EU from January, requiring the production of a paper-based Key Investor Document (KID) for all products sold to European retail investors. The UK, meanwhile, has started to explore a new digital retail disclosure system.

JPMorgan Asset Management plans to convert a number of active mutual funds in the US to passive ETFs next year. The asset manager is not alone. Globally, passive is starting to catch up with active.

Swiss-based real estate investment manager Empira has sold a 16,000 square metre property project in Vienna for an undisclosed amount. The property had been held through a Luxembourg Reserved Alternative Investment Fund.

The Zug, Switzerland based firm had only bought the property two years ago. In a statement, Empira spoke about a “successful sale at attractive terms… exactly in line with the investment approach of this product”. 

Total assets under management in Europe amounted to 28,400 billion euro by the end of September, reflecting a decline of about 12 percent from year-end 2021 levels as bond and stock markets fell amid rising inflation and interest rates and slowing economic growth following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

An investment fund owned by Luxembourg-based Cube Infrastructure Managers has recently announced a first-phase investment of 50 million euros into a wholesale fiber-to-the-home/ fiber-to-the-office project in southern Italy.

When completed, this network will bring fiber broadband to 130,000 locations within two years, reaching over 20 municipalities and a number of business parks in rural and semi-rural areas. It will create new job opportunities in the region.

Vanguard, the world’s second-largest investment fund manager after BlackRock, is finding itself in a political tug of war in the US that now has led to its decision to withdraw a top international alliance of asset managers that seeks to promote sustainable, net zero investments, the Net Zero Asset Management initiative, also known as NZAM.

British activist investor Bluebell Capital Partners is aiming its guns at BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, and its CEO Larry Fink, criticising the firm for its ‘hypocrisy’ over its ESG and sustainability practices while drawing attention to its failure to exercise proper ESG stewardship. The asset manager’s behaviour risks becoming “an obstructive force” to the effective functioning of capitalism, it said, calling for Fink to step down.