Investment Officer

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.

While the smokescreens on the greenwashing battlefield have yet to lift, a new headache file has presented itself in financial markets: the impact of artificial intelligence on market participants and regulators. On that front, transparency is “zero”, European Markets Authority Esma has concluded in a new study on artificial intelligence in EU securities markets.

European Ucits and AIF investment funds experienced net outflows of 278 billion euro last year, the biggest level since the financial crisis of 2008, according to industry statistics compiled by the European Fund and Asset Management Association, Efama.

Denis Panel has been appointed as the new chief executive officer of Sycomore Asset Management, a unit of Generali Investments, the firm announced on Tuesday.