Private Banks

Private banks are navigating challenges in discerning customers’ sustainability preferences, hindered by a lack of common definitions and necessary data. The struggle persists as new legislation under Mifid 2, effective since August 2022, mandates including sustainability factors in suitability tests. Oxford Risk’s survey among wealth managers reveals industry-wide difficulties in implementation.

Protracted discussions over the EU’s new regime for European Long Term Investment Funds, known as Eltifs, are delaying the launch of new funds for these private asset investments.

Berlin-based Moonfare said it plans to create a dedicated secondary liquidity mechanism that enables retail investors in Eltif 2.0 funds to unwind their holdings before the fund matures.

More than two thirds of fund selectors see active fund management as key to outperforming in the current year, a reflection of its growing importance in uncertain markets, the latest Natixis 2024 Fund Selector Outlook Survey shows.

The survey uncovered a strategic pivot among wealth managers, who over the past decade have largely favoured passively managed index funds. However, 45% of fund selectors attribute the outperformance of passive investments to a decade of artificially low interest rates and minimal inflation, conditions that are changing. 

Those who make money in Luxembourg’s real estate sector are still in shock after the arrival in this country of the long-ago predicted 2023 global real estate correction.

Investment specialists are singing from a common hymn book in predicting the world is on a path to lower inflation and treasury yields, though they carefully call attention to possible transitional effects, Investment Officer heard while covering two recent investment events in Luxembourg hosted by J. Safra Sarasin and Capital Group.

In an uncertain geopolitical and macroeconomic environment, Iris van de Looij has recently taken charge of investment teams at InsingerGilissen, Quintet’s private bank in the Netherlands. The bank is currently in a slightly defensive mode, but sees scope to add some more risk to its portfolio again. 

Christine Lynch has been appointed as Group Chief Risk Officer at Luxembourg-headquartered Quintet Private Bank. She joins from HSBC, where she served for over 25 years, most recently as chief risk officer wholesale and as head of enterprise risk.

Lynch will also be a member of Quintet’s Authorized Management Committee, subject to regulatory approval. She succeeds Philip Tremble, who retired last year following more than four decades in banking.

While many asset managers continue to explore private investments amidst growing market uncertainties, Optimix Asset Management has consistently avoided them. “Investors don’t need private markets,”  said Jelte de Boer, managing director of Amsterdam-based Optimix, a Dutch subsidiary of Swedish bank Handelsbanken.

Private banks will have to get serious about outsourcing if they want to prosper once interest rates come down, says Pascal Martino, partner at Deloitte and co-author of a new report on tech leadership in private banking.