Riccardo Lamanna has recently become the Luxembourg Country Head for State Street. He entered the position after spending more than 30 years in the business, having worked in Milan, London and Paris at various institutions, including JP Morgan, Paribas, the Intesa Sanpaolo Group and over the past 11 years, at State Street. He pointed to his prior work on State Street’s acquisition of Intesa Sanpaolo’s securities services business, saying that it was “very important to me, a very important experience at State Street, to run the integration of a business.” Investment Officer Luxembourg was recently able to interview him.
What are your ambitions as Luxembourg country head?
Luxembourg is a major location for us in terms of clients, people, products, and obviously now even more important with the upcoming acquisition of BBH (State Street recently announced the acquisition of Brown Brothers Harriman’s investor services business).
State Street is number one, in terms of assets, client franchises and all the different products that we sell: custody, fund administration, as well as a transfer agent in Luxembourg. And now we face the need to ensure that we can get the full benefit of the entire State Street Corporation at State Street Luxembourg, not only from a client point of view, but as well as from the infrastructure and service points of view.
My role as a country manager is to ensure we satisfy the needs of our clients’ Luxembourg-domiciled products in collaboration with our segment leads who develop the strategy for the 6 clients segments we serve: traditional asset managers, asset owners, insurance, official institutions, wealth managers and alternative asset managers, and the product lines who are responsible for developing the required functionalities.
What lessons do you take from the COVID crisis?
I think most of us providers were surprised about our ability to switch from full work in the office to work from home 100% in one day. We learned that we have a model that can integrate much more flexible solutions for our employees and for our clients. We started taking care of our employees completely in a different way, to become an inclusive space, even if you’re not there physically.
One thing that was incredible was the progress that we made in terms of office automation, and office tools. However, we continue to need the social side, the people side, which will have to be treated differently, with the implementation of new concepts of space utilisation.
What is your impression of how asset managers have classified their funds under SFDR?
Classifying reporting is not an easy task. ESG information does not come for free. It needs a lot of work to make it usable. There are asset managers who decides to be more aggressive than others,. What we do as a provider is to actively work to put our clients into a position to effectively use data from the ESG point of view.
You need integrated data which are consistent through the entire value chain, i.e. you cannot afford to have data at the front office level which is different from the data that you have the middle office or the back office level.
Do asset managers have enough ESG knowledge to manage this process successfully?
The knowledge is coming. They are all investing in ESG. It’s so important that you cannot stay behind. As usual, there are pioneers that are moving very fast. And typically, I would say, asset owners, pension funds have invested significantly in their ESG.
How successful is the CSSF, the financial regulator, in balancing the need for effective fund sector regulation with the requirement to provide good value financial service services?
The development of Luxembourg as a financial centre, I think, witnesses the long-term view of the CSSF, the pragmatism applied with very rigid regulatory rules. They have been, in many cases, ahead of other regulators with respect to the financial services market. This has been one of the reasons why Luxembourg’s financial services sector has clearly grown and continues to be very prosperous. I think a good chunk of the success goes with a good regulatory approach that balances between the rigid need of a regulator as well as taking a longer term view, understanding the new products, facilitating, pioneering types of investments and helping to look after all the asset classes, availability of different vehicles, and different ways of carrying out the investment.