Investment Officer

CapitalatWork is investigating the possibility of making small acquisitions in the Netherlands. The Belgian asset manager states it already has sufficient critical mass in its home market and the Luxembourg market, but is also looking at acquisition opportunities there.

This according to CEO Maarten Rooijakkers and CIO Erwin Deseyn (photo) of CapitalatWork in an interview with Investment Officer.

Factor investing in bonds is making inroads with both institutional and wholesale investors, according to a study by Invesco. However, there’s still a perceived lack of suitable products.

The year 2018 saw a 37% jump in the number of worldwide single family offices to no fewer than 7,300. Altogether family offices manage assets of nearly 6 trillion dollars.

Millennials are more interested in thematic investing than other age groups. Especially funds that focus on sustainability, education, infrastructure innovation, food and urbanisation are popular with Generation Y.

This transpires from the results of a study by Schroders among 25,000 investors who plan to invest at least 10,000 euros in the coming year.

Luxembourg banks want to work together to create common standards on certain compliance-related functions, a survey by the Luxembourg Bankers’ Association ABBL among its member showed. 93% of respondents said they see such cooperation as ‘valuable for the financial services community’.

Luxembourg’s banks are not yet reaping the benefits of Brexit as Brexit-related additional costs are outstripping the rise in revenues. This has led to a year-on-year decline of 5.4% in banks’ profits in the third quarter of 2019, according to CSSF figures.

Iqbal Khan, the new co-head of global wealth management at UBS, plans to break up the Swiss bank’s dedicated unit for the ultra wealthy. According to the Financial Times, this is part of an overhaul designed to increase higher-margin lending to some of the world’s biggest family offices.

Airbnb will move the processing of all EU payments from the UK to Luxembourg as of 2020 because of Brexit.

The home rental platform opened a subsidiary in Luxembourg at the end of last year and was granted a payment institution license in the country last month.

In a number of recent judgements, the Court of Appeal in Brussels has confirmed previous case law of the court of first instance that the subscription tax on Luxembourg SICAVs is in violation of the double taxation treaty. Tiberghien Lawyers was one of the first to raise this issue 15 years ago and is therefore pleased with the verdicts.

‘It’s worth investigating the possibilities of reclaiming this tax (and Belgian withholding tax),’ say Lawyers Yannick Cools and Bart De Cock of Tiberghien Lawyers.