Asset Owner

Vietnamese finance minister Nguyen Van Thang met with representatives from FTSE Russell last week to discuss the potential reclassification of Vietnam’s capital market. This marks an important moment in Vietnam’s journey from frontier market to emerging market status in 2025—a long-awaited upgrade that has been on the table since 2018.

First-half numbers posted last week by Partners Group, followed by a sober warning from Morningstar on Monday, suggest that momentum in semi-liquid evergreens may stall if returns continue to disappoint.

Investors still too often view emerging market debt (EMD) as a simple choice between hard and local currency. That’s a missed opportunity, says Cathy Hepworth, who established PGIM Fixed Income’s EMD team 30 years ago. According to her, the true strength of the asset class lies in its diversity.

Local emerging-markets debt strategies took a beating in the last quarter of 2024 but recovered spectacularly in dollar terms in the first half of 2025 with the widely-used JPM GBI-EM Global Diversified index recording a return of 13 percent for the six-month period.

Developments in public finances are unfolding at such a rapid pace that there’s barely time left to look at asset prices themselves. But if you take a step back, it’s hard not to conclude that we are witnessing a regime shift. So why is hardly anyone talking about it?

The accelerating growth of active ETFs is blurring the lines between active and passive management. Critics warn that it may be an old trap in a new disguise: funds that claim to be active but behave almost exactly like an index—the so-called closet trackers.

Delen Private Bank is exploring plans to establish a permanent presence in Zurich. This would be its second Swiss base, after Geneva.

The US government is preparing a shock therapy approach that amounts to a controlled demolition of the current system. The goal is to turn the United States into the global hub for digital currencies.

We are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation in wealth management. Financial decisions are increasingly being made by algorithms. Within just a few years, AI-driven applications will become the primary source of advice for retail investors, with usage expected to grow to 80 percent by 2028. This is not some distant vision of the future—it’s already happening.

Paris-based platform to distribute private market investments via Belgian private banks and family offices. The Paris-based platform Private Corner is making its first move outside of France, aiming to sell private market investments to wealthy Belgian investors through the distribution networks of private banks and family offices.