In the past week we looked back at some of the highlights of our London event. In other news, Mediobanca automated its certificate issuance process while the FCA set out its policy position on Priips.
Structured investments are providing ‘fresh opportunities’ to traditional pension and insurance providers as traditional products are failing to deliver, according to panellists at the SRP Europe 2022 Conference held on 24 March, in London.
The need for insurance companies to diversity the portfolios beyond traditional assets has led to a growing momentum for private solutions over the last few years.
Investors remain focused on traditional solutions due to the demography - Vincenzo Pinto, Generali
The most important change is the substitution rate from the accumulation position to retirement and people have started to understand that they need to fill this gap with private solutions, said Vincenzo Pinto, head of individual saving solutions at Generali.
“Investors remain focused on traditional solutions due to the demography although insurance companies are in the middle of this new environment,” he said.
Also at SRP Europe, Mahesh Bulchandani, CEO of FinIQ Europe, showed how technology can bolster front office for structured products offerings in six steps while Quantessence Technology enabled Generali Asset & Wealth Management to achieve its digital transformation and automate the management of individual savings solutions.
In the indexing panel, participants agreed that market cap and custom indices continue to drive activity, innovation and complexity as well as value to investors in the structured products market.
Italian bank Mediobanca partnered with UK software-as-a-service (SaaS) Agora Digital Capital Markets to automate its certificate issuance process using the agoraPlatform, a platform that uses Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
The project will enable Mediobanca to achieve greater operational efficiency. It is aimed at facilitating growth in investment certificates, a market in which the Italian bank is one of the leading players with more than 300 issuances per annum.
Canada's Crypto structured products provider InvestDEFY introduced Sygma, a weekly market neutral yield harvest programme targeted at institutional investors, family offices, high-net-worth individuals, Bitcoin miners, and DeFi yield farmers. The product has been designed to provide lower volatility and a low correlation relative to Bitcoin or Ethereum, without employing leverage and it’ is powered by the firm’s digital asset trading automation platform.
S&P Dow Jones Indices and the Japan Exchange co-launched the S&P/JPX 500 ESG Score Tilted Index Series, which is designed to improve the ESG characteristics of Japan’s Topix 500 while offering a similar risk and return profile of its parent index.
The indices employ a range of scaling factors that provide tilting of 0.25, 0.5, 1.0 and 2.0 when applied to the weighting scheme with the S&P/JPX 500 ESG Score Tilted Index (0.5) serving as the standard tilted index.
In regulatory news, The UK financial Conduct Authority (FCA) set out its final policy position on the Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products (Priips) Regulation while the US Financial and Regulatory Agency (Finra) launched a consultation related to the sale of complex products and options in light of continued concerns and increased activity.
Meanwhile, Julius Baer posted its highest ever profit and Deutsche Bank collected US$6.1m with a capital protected note on DWS Concept Kaldemorgen in Belgium. The 10-year medium-term note (MTN) offers annual income equal to the annualised performance of the fund, subject to a minimum coupon of one percent and a maximum coupon of 6.5% per annum.
The product is the 22nd structure on the fund marketed by Deutsche in Belgium, where it first used DWS Concept Kaldermorgen as an underlying in 2013. They sold a combined €200m.
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