Vontobel has added LGT, Maybank, KGI Securities and Union Bancaire Privée as the first four Asia-Pacific distributors of structured products to join its deritrade multi issuer platform (MIP).
Winning the support from four distributors is a strong endorsement of deritrade MIP's track record as the leading front-to-back offering in the market, said Anup Gupta (pictured), head of Vontobel's deritrade MIP in Asia Pacific.
"With client advisors in Asia spending 10-20% of their time on price finding, deritrade offers a user interface to enable users to work with clients in real time to develop structures, thereby generating significant cost savings through time efficiency and enhancing the client offering and experience," said Gupta. "The platform in Asia is already available with local payoffs and features, and also offering the Swiss payoffs to interested parties."
Vontobel rolled out deritrade MIP for structured products to the Singapore wealth management market in early 2014 with the aim of expanding the coverage further to provide fully automated pricing feeds for customised equity-linked notes (ELNs) and fixed coupon notes (FCN) with Asian underlyings to Asia-Pacific private banks and distributors.
The Swiss bank continued to build its structured products capabilities in the region in 2014 with the appointment of Thomas Süssli who took over the management of Vontobel Financial Products (Asia Pacific) in Singapore as chief executive, and Gupta as head of deritrade MIP in Asia Pacific.
"Deritrade MIP is key to Vontobel Financial Products' growth strategy in APAC," said Süssli. "The early success of the platform in the region shows that it addresses a significant need present in the market for automation. It will cause a paradigm shift from product to advisory centricity."
The structured products market in APAC is in the midst of a fundamental change to reduce costs, said Gupta, who pointed at the launch of Contineo multi-issuer platform as proof that the structured products market in Asia is increasingly moving towards electronification.
"My understanding is that Contineo is an issuer-led network focused on price discovery and execution," said Gupta. "Deritrade MIP provides a comprehensive front-to-back service across the entire structured products value chain including idea generation, pricing & execution, term sheet creation, straight through processing (STP) processing and lifecycle management."
Deritrade MIP is seeking to replicate its Swiss operation which has already six prominent issuers including UBS, Vontobel, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale and Zurcher Kantonalbank, representing more than 70% of the sizable exchange traded structured products volumes in Switzerland, said Gupta.
According to SRP database, Vontobel provides 1,600 products in 2015 year-to-date globally, and is the most active provider in issuance. According to Vontobel, Vontobel is one of the top two market leaders in Switzerland in in traded volume of structured products, making up about 22% of the market share.
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