Sector

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.

Luxembourg’s financial system has weathered the pandemic well, but the Russia-Ukraine conflict poses new risks to Luxembourg’s economy while the surge in housing prices from recent years threatens the attractiveness of the Grand Duchy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has concluded after a two-week mission.

The future of some 855 funds with exposure to Russia is shrouded in uncertainty as the turmoil in Russia’s financial markets continued on Monday. JP Morgan AM and Prosperity on Monday suspended their funds with assets in Russia. East Capital warned of “a very high level of disruption”. Asset managers are facing requests for information from their regulators.

For a country that is well established as a global leader in investment funds, one might expect its people to embrace more risk when it comes to their financial investments. As it turns out, the love for cash deposits is as big as ever.