coronavirus crisis

Traditionally, the first outlooks for the coming year trickle in from September onwards. With sometimes a quarter of a year still to go, strategists start relating their vision of the economic and financial themes that await investors in the next calendar year. The big question is which investors have actually hit the mark in their outlook for 2021. The reckoning. 

Many people will continue to work partly from home until after the pandemic is over. This reduces demand for office space. At the same time, however, the function of offices is changing. This means office space will continue to be in demand, and mainly at prime locations, says Richard Gwilliam, head of property research at M&G Real Estate.

Working from home has started to negatively affect productivity, according to Olivier Coekelbergs, the new Country Managing Partner of EY Luxembourg. He tells Investment Officer’s Stephen Evans how he is seeking to address this.

Financial and insurance businesses in Luxembourg have been denied access to the Covid-19 partial unemployment aid. They are probably also ineligible for the new package to support the economic recovery.

When Luxembourg implemented partial unemployment on 18 March to support companies and their employees impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, around 320 claims from financial and insurance institutions for a total of €47.7 million were rejected by the authorities.

Could the coronavirus crisis prove to be a blessing in disguise for the financial industry in Luxembourg? It seems to have accelerated the adoption of new technologies in a sector that is traditionally somewhat resistant to innovation, and offers fresh opportunities to cut costs.

The income of Degroof Petercam Luxembourg’s private banking division has not been dented by the coronavirus crisis. To the contrary, results have been ‘above expectations’ thanks to a sharp increase in trading revenue, says its head Kris De Souter in an interview with Investment Officer.

State Street Luxembourg seems to have ridden out the first wave of the coronavirus crisis. Yet what of the return to work and a potential secondary shock? We asked Eduardo Gramuglia Pallavicino, State Street Luxembourg’s country head.

‘It all worked quite well. The regulators were quite pragmatic, simplifying some of the processes and allowing workload to be balanced across locations,’ Mr Gramuglia Pallavicino said confidently. ‘These changes were necessary, as in March transaction volumes were double the norm.’

Most institutional investors expect there to be minimal impact on their business from the coronavirus crisis, even though three in ten say their daily investment-related operations were disrupted by the volatility. These are the key findings of State Street’s ‘Volatility Study 2020’ – seen exclusively by investmentofficer.lu – which surveyed 640 mainly insurance and pension funds in April.

The performance gap between East Asia and other emerging markets has never been greater than in the first five months of 2020. At first sight, the cause looks obvious: coronavirus. But in the background there is a different dynamic at play.

Ironically, the ranking of best-performing stock markets in 2020 is led by China, the country where the pandemic originated. Korea and Taiwan are also well on their way, and in any case doing much better than most other emerging markets (see graph below).

Contrary to the predictions of some that the pandemic will see a pull-back from globalisation, Jurgen Vanhoenacker, who heads the Sales and Wealth Structuring teams at Lombard International Assurance in Luxembourg, sees no signs of a reduced appetite for clients to live cross-border lives.