Investment Officer Luxembourg

Belgian investment house Degroof Petercam on Wednesday named Gautier Bataille as its new CEO for Luxembourg. Filip Depaz has been appointed as chief operating officer for the group.

Bataille will succeed Bruno Houdmont from 1 August. He has held several leadership roles at the firm and currently is executive member of the management board and group head of business development.

The increasingly stringent EU regime for green finance was discussed in Paris on Wednesday at the World Pensions Council conference. Pension fund APG believes that the EU approach has introduced “commercial incentives to go dark green”, exposing the industry to greenwashing. “I am not convinced that all the rules and regulations get the industry to do the right thing,” said Gert Dijkstra, senior managing director at APG.

Apex Group is adding another firm to its growing string of acquisitions, announcing that it plans to take over Amsterdam-based Darwin Depositary Services, a firm that provides depositary services to alternative investment funds in Europe. Financial details were not disclosed.

As the only independent AIFMD depositary in mainland Europe, Darwin provides services to a range of international clients, including hedge funds, real estate, debt and private equity funds as well as funds investing in infrastructure and renewable energy.

Sustainability funds have been selling like hot cakes in recent years. Not surprisingly, many fund houses like to see their funds classified as Article 8 or 9 under the SFDR. After all, these are the funds where sustainability criteria play a role in the investment process. We provide an overview of the most popular equity funds within this group over the past 12 months.

Fifteen years ago, I bought my first iPhone in Denver, Colorado. Not entirely coincidentally, I was on holiday in the US. I did not have to queue up, but walked into the Apple store in the afternoon. The iPhones with 4 and 8 Gb flash memory were sold out, but the one with 16 Gb was still for sale.

Germany has unexpectedly reported its first trade deficit since 1991. The reversal of the trade balance in Europe’s largest economy shows how difficult it is for German companies to handle rising costs of oil and gas. Economists at ABN Amro and Nomura meanwhile expect Europe will enter into a recession.

In Luxembourg’s financial sector, ‘the new Ucits’ is an informal but widely recognised label that stands for innovation and promising change. It refers to the success of its 1980s investment legislation that offered European passports to Ucits investments funds, sparking a multi-decade boom in the financial sector, turning Luxembourg into Europe’s leading hub for investment funds and replacing the steel industry as the country’s main economic driver.

The global macro environment will continue to be anything but normal over the next five years. Investors will have to tread a volatile and challenging path. “Our expectations for a more volatile macroeconomic and market environment call for low and realistic expectations for asset market returns over the secular horizon.”

US asset manager Columbia Threadneedle on Monday said it has completed the rebranding of the European activities of BMO Global Asset Management, bringing its products and savings plans together under a single brand.