Motive Partners, a global private equity firm focused on growth investing, has acquired a controlling interest in Lucht Probst Associates (LPA), a software and advisory services focused on financial services distribution and regulatory compliance solutions.

Motive Partners will support LPA in accelerating the company's growth, including product development, international expansion and strategic hiring. Headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and founded in 1999, LPA is a financial technology solutions provider with a focus on capital markets and wealth management participants. LPA offers a broad suite of software to optimize processes and enable regulatory compliance, as well as providing strategic advice and implementation services.

LPA’s core offering is comprised of a suite of automated advice tools (LPA Digital Client Interaction), distribution (LPA Captano) and documentation (LPA Doc) for financial instruments, particularly structured products and OTC derivatives. LPA offers a market leading solution that allows banks to efficiently comply with regulation under MIfid 2, Priips and Fidleg requirements relating to the Key Investor Information Document (Kiid). Other significant opportunities for value creation include product and service expansion into adjacent sub-sectors of the financial services industry.

LPA's founders, Stefan Lucht (pictured) and Roland Probst, and the firm’s management team will continue with the company. The founders will remain shareholders and managing directors of LPA, and Peter Schurau, an industry partner at Motive Partners, will join LPA’s management team to assist with the growth initiatives.

DWS and Generali tighten partnership on unit-linked solutions

DWS Group and Generali Group have agreed to expand their existing cooperation on unit-linked products. The two Groups will further strengthen their relationship globally, making DWS one of the insurance group’s preferred asset managers for Generali’s subsidiaries in key European markets.

The agreement follows a selection process run by Assicurazioni Generali through its business unit asset, wealth and investment management to select a limited number of asset managers to partner with on specific solutions. This collaboration is fully in line with the implementation of the Generali Group asset management strategy, announced in May 2017.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies will work to further their cooperation efforts in providing unit-linked solutions in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany as well as potentially in other countries.

DWS ranks fourth globally among insurance asset managers (source: Insurance Investment Exchange Survey 2018), offering its global client-base individual solutions for their investment needs from a broad range of products. The asset manager also ranks first in the German market for unit-linked insurance products, with a 40% market share (source: FondsProfessionell Analysis, October 2018).

Generali is an active provider of structured products on a number of European markets including France (three products/US$69.20m, Germany (two products/ US$147.81m, Hungary (five products/ US5.36m; and Italy (23 products/ US$389.82m. DWS on its part, also has several live structures in Germany (20 products/ US$4.1bn) and Austria (10 products/ US$3.7m).

IHS Markit introduces new cloud-based platform for EQD trading

IHS Markit has introduced a new cloud-based technology for post-trade processing of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives trades. The new platform, TradeServ, was launched in September for matching, confirming, and clearing trades of non-deliverable forwards (NDFs).

Currently, 32 banks and asset managers are live with TradeServ, and more than one million cleared NDF trades have been processed using MarkitSERV this year. TradeServ is a platform as a service (PaaS) that uses microservices architecture and cloud infrastructure to make the platform ‘flexible, scalable and reliable’.

According to IHS Markit, it provides customers with better access to trade data, easier integration, and more continuous service upgrades in response to changing regulation and industry needs. IHS Markit announced that it will migrate foreign exchange (FX) options, spots and forwards to TradeServ in the first half of next year.

Reliance Standard ditches legacy systems as it moves to Fast platform

Fast which stands for “Flexible Architecture, Simplified Technology”, a firm specialised in financial services and helping the insurance market replace legacy systems has converted Reliance Standard’s legacy block of traditional and indexed annuity business onto Fast Insurance.

The platform now provides policy administration capabilities for all of Reliance Standard’s annuity products. The successful completion of this program will enable Reliance Standard to access one system supporting all of its annuity business operations.

Bahrain boutique signs up to ‘Sharia’ for its securities business

Alpha Capital, a boutique investment firm focused on asset management and alternative investments has appointed Shariyah Review Bureau (SRB) to oversee its Sharia compliant investment funds and securities business.

Alpha Capital’s bespoke products and services include direct access to fixed income fund, structured products, discretionarily managed portfolios, investment real-estate funds and private funds. The firm has already established two standalone Sharia compliant public funds this year and is now working on a range of investment funds to meet the needs of its growing private asset business in the Kingdom. The appointment of a global Sharia advisory firm which has certified investments across all asset classes and has deep knowledge of the Islamic industry highlights the firm’s commitment to growth in Sharia compliant alternative investment business, according to Fahad Khalid AlSaud, managing director and CEO at Alpha Capital.

‘The needs of the markets are changing and diversification backed with positive returns are key to creating wealth, and this is why we are structuring our investment case with alpha based returns in this challenging market,’ said Khalid AlSaud.