Sector

“It is not five minutes to twelve, but one minute to twelve,” said Detlef van Vuuren, one of the Dutch scientists who collaborated on the latest report by the UN climate agency, the IPCC. 

According to the report, presented on Monday, countries have to invest three to six times more than currently agreed in measures to reduce greenhouse gases. If that does not happen, the climate goals will be far out of reach. That is this week’s alarming message from the United Nations. 

Sanctions imposed on companies and individuals in Russia and Belarus have triggered concerns that crypto-currencies offer an escape route to circumvent them. Insiders argued that these concerns are unjustified, although crypto sceptics argue that “we should not be naive”.

Fierce competition has emerged in the changing data landscape for investment funds, and Luxembourg is the finding itself at the centre of attention. The Frankfurt and Luxembourg stock exchanges now confront each other face to face in the grand duchy, while the Paris bourse has thrown its towel into the ring and is back on the sidelines. 

Fund data specialist FE fundinfo, partly owned by the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, said it has reached an agreement with Euronext to acquire French fund data provider Funds360 for an undisclosed amount. The deal expands its geographical presence in Europe and Asia. 

Luxembourg has frozen some 2.5 billion euro in Russian assets, mostly held in shares, bonds and bank accounts, as part of the international sanctions against Russia, its finance minister told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.

The frozen funds relate to sanctions that have been imposed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February and do not consider sanctions that existed beforehand, the minister said. 

The grand duchy of Luxembourg is the second most popular destination for financial services companies seeking to establish themselves in Europe after the UK gave up its membership of the European Union, consultancy firm EY said in a final update of its Brexit Tracker. EY has crowned Dublin as winner for the location of choice for operational moves.

Deutsche Börse Group is taking over Luxembourg-based fund data specialist Kneip Communication S.A. for an undisclosed amount in order to expand its offerings in the data services space and to develop an international fund data hub based in the Grand Duchy.

This partnership forms the basis for creating a leading fund data hub based in Luxembourg, the companies said in a joint statement.

Fondsnieuws, the Dutch-language sister publication of InvestmentOfficer.lu, on Thursday was renamed as Investment Officer as it migrated to a new website, investmentofficer.nl, in order to better serve its subscribers in the Netherlands. With this migration, Investment Officer becomes a true Benelux media service for investment professionals, operating with a single brand for news and info services in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF on Thursday acknowledged that there is ‘some’ room for improving its international cooperation with other supervisors after a peer review conducted by the EU’s securities markets authority found a number of shortcomings in the supervision of financial institutions that provide cross-border services to retail clients under the European passporting system.

In what observers labelled as “dovish tightening”, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday evening raised interest rates for the first time since 2018 and flagged that six more rate hikes are coming later this year. Equity markets rallied but with an inverting yield curve, Treasuries reflect hesitation.