Administration d’actifs

Apex Group said it has been appointed by Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management to service its Australian fund. Apex, a Bermuda-headquartered global firm with a strong presence in Luxembourg, has been appointed to provide fund administration and transfer agency services to the Kayne Anderson Rudnick Global Small Cap Fund.

Apex Group on Tuesday said it has been appointed by BrightEdge LLC, the impact investment and venture capital arm of the American Cancer Society, to support the ACS Impact Venture Fund with fund administration services.

Luxembourg has recently seen the launch of the Luxembourg Valuation Professionals Association, also known as LVPA. Valuations are “extremely strategic for building trust with your investors,” said Hind El Gaidi, one of the LVPA’s co-founders. For this Luxembourg edition of the IO Talks podcast, El Gaidi spoke to Investment Officer together with three fellow co-founders: Christophe Vandendorpe, partner at EY; Rafaël Le Saux, director at PwC; and Antoine Boggini, co-founder at BHB & Partners, an independent advisory firm.

Developments in Luxembourg legislation have enabled the European Investment Bank, the  EIB, to issue for the first time a digital bond under Luxembourg law. In a project codenamed Project Venus, the EIB this week raised 100 million euro by issuing a blockchain-based bond in cooperation with the central banks of France and Luxembourg and backed by a deal team working in five countries.

Markets for depositary and custodian banking services in Luxembourg are “heavily concentrated”, with the top ten banks holding more than three quarters of all assets, the first ever survey on depositary and custodian services in the grand duchy shows.

By successfully closing its acquisition of European Fund Administration, Universal Investment has pushed its assets under administration by more than a fifth to above 900 billion euro in more than 7000 funds, the firm has announced. Financial details were not disclosed.

Following regulatory approval, Apex Group has completed its acquisition of Darwin Depositary Services, an Amsterdam-based provider of depositary services to alternative investment funds, the company announced this morning. Financial details were not disclosed.

Apex Group, a global financial services company with a major presence in Luxembourg, said on Wednesday that it has closed its acquisition of Implemented Investment Solutions, or IIS, and InvestNow in New Zealand.  Financial details were not disclosed.

Following Apex Group’s entry into the New Zealand market with the recent addition of MMC, the acquisitions of IIS and InvestNow further expand Apex Group’s presence in New Zealand and Australia to over 500 employees.

Dublin-based third-party management company Waystone on Tuesday said that it has closed its acquisition of Irish fund management services firm KB Associates in a transaction that makes it Ireland’s largest management company for Ucits funds.

As a result of the transaction, Waystone said it will welcome on board 90 new team members and will now support European management company assets exceeding 300 billion dollars. 

Amundi Group’s distribution platform Fund Channel has taken Caceis on board as a shareholder and now to plans to accelerate its growth in distribution in order to deliver on its ambition of nearly doubling its assets under intermediation by the end of 2025.  

Amundi is Europe’s  largest asset manager with some 1.86 trillion euro in assets under management. Since 2005, the firm has offered an open-architecture fund distribution platform called Fund Channel, designed as B2B platform for financial intermediaries.