SG and UBS made high-profile hires, while Sweden and Austria saw market activity going in different directions.

Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking (SGCIB) has promoted Didier Imbert to head of public distribution Europe, effective immediately. He took over from Klaus Oppermann, the former head of public distribution Europe and managing director at the French bank who ended his professional career at the end of 2021. In this new role, Imbert reports to Olivier Chameau, global head of linear equity derivatives trading and public distribution, and Julien Lascar, global head of equity derivatives sales.

In addition, Peter Boesenberg has been appointed as deputy head of public distribution Europe, in addition to his role of head of public distribution, Germany & Austria.

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange (LuxSE) has admitted for the financial instruments registered on a public distributed ledger technology (DLT) on its Securities Official List (LuxSE SOL) for the first time. The three series of security tokens admitted for trading are digital covered bonds (OFH Tokens) and structured products issued by Société Générale’s digital assets arm, Société Générale - Forge (SG - Forge), natively on the Ethereum and Tezos public blockchains respectively.

Julien Chuard has been hired as head of QIS structuring for Americas at UBS in New York following a short stint at MerQube. Chuard joined from MerQube where he stayed for five months as head of products in charge of creating and distributing products, and commercialising ‘large scale and highly available systems and next generation technology driven indices’. Prior to MerQube, Chuard was head of institutional QIS structuring at J.P. Morgan in New York and Hong Kong SAR focusing on quantitative strategies in the volatility, asset allocation and linear space.

The market for structured products in Austria has grown significantly in 2021. As of 31 December 2021, the outstanding amount for live structured products stood at €14.8 billion while the trading volume reached €3.7 billion during the year, according to figures from the Austrian certificate association (Zertifikate Forum Austria or ZFA). Volumes for investment products grew by 9.8%, or €650m, while certificates without full capital protection – such as minimum redemption products as well as bonus certificates, express certificates and reverse convertibles – were up by 26%, or €880m on the previous year. However, products with full capital protection, in Austria normally the strongest category, saw their volumes decrease by 6.9%, or €226.3m.

The recent boom of the registered index-linked annuity (Rila) during turbulent markets led to retirement clients swapping out fixed index annuities (FIA) for the more stable alternative. Rilas sales, which reached US$39 billion in 2021, appear to be on track to cross the US$50 billion milestone by 2026, according to a Cerulli report.

The report states that Rila sales more than doubled in 2020 reaching US$24 billion from US$11 billion in 2018. Activity was largely driven by broker-dealer, advisor awareness and understanding (85%), large insurers entering the space (80%), and increasing supply (80%).

In Sweden, Goldman reached the number one spot for the first time. Some 461 structured products worth an estimated SEK7.6 billion (US$892m) had strike dates in Sweden between 1 January and 31 December 2021 – down 10% in sales volumes compared to the previous year (FY2020: SEK8.4 billion from 526 products).

Sixteen issuer groups, a mixture of Nordic financial institutions and European/US investment banks, were active during the year.

Of these, Goldman Sachs, which saw its sales volumes increase by almost 70% year-on-year, was the number one provider. The US investment bank topped the charts for the first time since the launch of the SRP Sweden database in April 2007, collecting SEK2 billion from 121 products – the equivalent of a 26.4% market share (FY2020: SEK1.2 billion from 95 products).

In second place, Nordea, with a 22.8% share of the market, registered an even bigger increase in sales volumes (+140% YoY) on the back of a much better performance of its autocalls.

Third placed was Credit Suisse, which held a 11.6% share of the market. Deutsche Bank (10%) and Danske Bank (8.6%) completed the top five.

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