Investment Officer

The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank will continue to hike their interest rates this month among broad and persistent signs of strong consumption and the “resilient nature” of economic activity, Guy Wagner, chief investment officer at BLI - Banque de Luxembourg Investments, said.

Financial supervisor CSSF has issued a fine of 1.56 million euros to the Luxembourg unit of Belgian bank Degroof Petercam after it found the firm to be in “non-compliance with its professional obligations” in regards to anti-money laundering measures.

Australian financial giant Macquarie is considering a bid worth more than 5 billion pounds (5.6 billion euro) for UK-headquartered fund manager and insurer M&G, which runs its non-UK European business from Luxembourg.

Schroders Capital on Wednesday said it has launched its first European Long-Term Investment Fund, or Eltif. The fund is called the Schroders Capital Private Equity Eltif 2023 and is classified as a ‘green’ Article 8 under the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation.

Schroders Capital Private Equity Eltif 2023 will focus on lower and mid-market private equity buyout and growth investments primarily in Europe but with the flexibility to allocate to non-European companies with high operating exposure to Europe, the firm said.

PwC Luxembourg has named Baptiste Guionnet as partner. Guionnet will support CEOs, CFOs and other C-level executives on all financial, performance and transformation matters of the finance function.

Until recently he served as partner at Deloitte Luxembourg where he worked for more than six years in the CFO advisory practice. Before joining Deloitte, he worked at Societe Generale and Natixis.

IntReal Luxembourg SA, a subsidiary of property-focused third-party AIF manager IntReal, has added Stephan Schilken, 48, to its management team as a managing director. He will serve in the position of conducting officer and brings to the job decades of experience in Luxembourg’s investment fund and financial sector.

Luxembourg’s leading financial sector associations, together with the supervisory authorities and the government, are about to launch a public campaign that seeks to elucidate the general public in the grand duchy on sustainable finance. 

In particular, the campaign aims to make clear that sustainable investing is more than just environmental ‘green finance’ and that ESG investing also relates to social issues and the governance of companies.

Financial services group Apex Group Ltd on Monday announced it has launched a new ESG database and benchmarking platform for private markets. 

Apex’s ESG data service is run as a ‘Data as a Service’, or DaaS, platform and draws on information from more than 400 GPs, 1,500 portfolio companies in more than 45 countries since 2019. It includes proprietary and verified data that can be used for benchmarking.

Marion Le Morhedec is global head of fixed income at AXA Investment Management. For this edition of IO’s Portfolio Update podcast she spoke with Investment Officer’s Max Severijns.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF on Friday brought attention to a warning from the grand duchy’s cyber security authorities which said an “alarming situation” has been created because more than 500 computer servers have not yet been updated with a critical software patch for Microsoft Exchange servers.