La société de gestion du Fonds de Consolidation et de Développement des Entreprises (FCDE) a annoncé jeudi 3 octobre la nomination de Charlotte Lepetit en qualité de secrétaire général. Auparavant, elle était senior manager chez KPMG Audit au sein du département des services d’investissement. A ce titre, elle est intervenue en audit et conseil auprès de nombreux acteurs du secteur de la gestion d’actifs et du private equity.Charlotte Lepetit s’est spécialisée dans la structuration des fonctions de contrôle interne, conformité et gestion des risques et dans l’accompagnement des prestataires de services d’investissement face aux changements (nouvelles réglementations, politiques, gouvernance,..), indique un communiqué.

D’après Institutional Investors’ alpha, relayant le blog DealBlog du New York Times, trois gérants supplémentaires ont quitté le gestionnaire alternatif SAC Capital Advisors, qui se trouve confronté à une procédure pour délit d’initiés. Ces trois spécialistes, basés à Londres, sont Alidod Shirinbekov, Woei Chan et Paul Crouch.

Amundi veut porter ses encours dans l’investissement socialement responsable de 66 milliards d’euros à fin juin 2013 à 100 milliards d’euros d’ici à 2 ans, a annoncé jeudi Yves Perrier, le directeur général de la société de gestion du groupe Crédit Agricole, au cours d’une conférence de presse. Au 30 juin, Amundi gérait un total de 750 milliards d’euros d’encours.Pour développer ses encours ISR, la société de gestion compte sur deux leviers. Le premier est la transformation de fonds traditionnels en fonds ISR, comme cela a déjà été le cas notamment dans le monétaire (qui représente d’ailleurs 37,76 % des encours ISR). Pierre Schereck, le directeur épargne entreprise et ISR d’Amundi, indique par exemple qu’en épargne salariale, 10 milliards d’euros sur 20 milliards d’euros ne sont pas encore ISR et pourraient le devenir. L’autre levier est celui de la collecte. Même si Yves Perrier juge que la demande en matière d’ISR est « marginale », notamment auprès des particuliers. D’ailleurs, les trois quarts des encours ISR d’Amundi sont gérés pour le compte d’investissements institutionnels.Au cours de cette conférence, Yves Perrier est aussi revenu sur le choix de faire certifier sa démarche ISR par l’Afnor Certification, et de délaisser les labels Novethic. « Il y avait des désaccords sur la démarche de Novethic, qui comporte plus d’exclusions que la notre », explique-t-il. « Le point de friction est le taux de sélectivité », a confirmé Anne-Catherine Husson Traore, directrice générale de Novethic. Yves Perrier a par ailleurs appelé des ses vœux la création d’un label ISR européen, plutôt que franco-français.La démarche ISR d’Amundi s’appuie sur l’analyse environnementale, sociale et de gouvernance de 4.600 émetteurs. Cela permet de composer des portefeuilles grâce à une approche best-in-class universelle. La recherche extra-financière est également mise à disposition de l’ensemble des gérants, qui ne sont toutefois pas obligés de l’utiliser.

Natixis AM (NAM) a annoncé jeudi 3 octobre sur son site qu’au terme d’un appel d’offres, cinq commissaires aux comptes se sont vu confier, chacun, une partie des OPCVM gérés par la société de gestion. «Les modalités de désignation des commissaires aux comptes des OPCVM ont été revues afin d’établir, avec ceux-ci, une relation durable s’inscrivant dans un processus efficace, clair et transparent», indique un communiqué. NAM justifie cette méthode en raison du nombre important d’OPCVM gérés. Avec l’objectif de parvenir rapidement à la cible de répartition des mandats entre les cinq cabinets retenus, indique un communiqué, des changements de commissaires aux comptes sont intervenus sur les FCP (de type ouvert) dont les noms figurent en pièce jointe. Ces modifications sont intervenus le 1er octobre 2013 dernier.

Grâce à la bonne tenue des marchés américains et internationaux, le taux de couverture moyen des engagements des fonds de pension d’entreprise américains a progressé au mois de septembre de 2,9 points de pourcentage pour s'établir à 91%, renouant ainsi avec un niveau jamais vu depuis juin 2011, selon BNY Mellon Investment Strategy & Solutions Group (ISSG). «Cette remontée à plus de 90% est importante pour de très nombreux programmes de retraite d’entreprise qui sont de ce fait davantage susceptibles de mettre en œuvre des stratégies pouvant diminuer l’exposition à la volatilité de marché», selon Jeffrey B. Saef, managing director chez BNY Melon Investment Management et responsable d’ISSG. Durant le mois sous revue, les actifs des fonds ont augmenté de 3,1% . Les engagements ont diminué de 0,2% , le taux d’actualisation augmentant de 3 points de base à 4,81% pour les entreprises notées Aa.

SAC Capital Advisors cherche un acquéreur pour une société de réassurance basée aux Bermudes que la société de hedge funds a lancée en 2012, selon le Wall Street Journal qui cite des personnes proches du dossier. SAC a débuté son activité l’an dernier avec 500 millions de dollars de capitaux de la part de la société de capital risque de son fondateur Steven A. Cohen et d’autres investisseurs. Mais, peu après, SAC a été inculpé pour des soupçons de délit d’initié.

Le groupe de gestion italien Azimut Holding et le gestionnaire indépendant basé à Singapour Athenaeum ont conclu un accord pour lancer des activités en partenariat sur le marché local, selon un communiqué publié le 2 octobre.S’il obtient les autorisations requises, Azimut, par l’intermédiaire de AZ International Holdings, rachètera 55% du capital de la société de gestion au travers d’une augmentation de capital qui permettra de financer le projet de partenariat. L'équipe dirigeante d’Atheaeum devrait rester aux côtés d’Azimut pour développer l’activité asiatique au cours des prochaines années.

A l’occasion de l’inauguration officielle des nouveaux locaux de BlackRock sur la Bahnhofstrasse à Zurich, Martin Gut, country head pour la Suisse, a indiqué que le gestionnaire américain pourrait bientôt employer sensiblement plus de 100 personnes à Zurich et Genève, contre 80 actuellement, rapporte finews.Ce sera de la croissance organique après que BlackRock ait acheté la multigestion de Swiss Re et l’activité ETF de Credit Suisse, ce qui a permis d’augmenter l’encours à près de 120 milliards de dollars.Par ailleurs, a annoncé Martin Gut, BlackRock est sur le point de créer une société de gestion et d’administration de fonds de droit suisse. Les pourparlers avec la Finma sont prometteurs, a précisé le manager.

Filiale à 100 % de Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft (Suisse), le zurichois LB(Swiss) Investment AG annonce le 3 octobre avoir ajouté au 1er octobre un nouveau pôle à ses activités, la représentation en Suisse des fonds étrangers. Cela vient compléter les activités de création et gestion de fonds ainsi que de conformité et de gestion du risque.En tant que centre de compétence, LB(Swiss) Investment offre à ses clients potentiels son expertise de la législation helvétique en matière de fonds, ce qui permet de développer une stratégie commerciale. De plus, le business model est conçu de manière à exclure les conflits d’intérêt, notamment en évitant toute situation de concurrence entre la société et ses clients, a souligné Marcel Weiss, directeur général.

Banque Raiffeisen a annoncé mercredi 2 octobre une hausse de 1 % des avoirs sous gestion au premier semestre 2013 par rapport au 31 décembre 2012. La progression est de 2,7% par rapport au 30 juin 2012. Au niveau des revenus, la progression du résultat sur intérêts s’établit à 5,2%, en ligne avec la croissance des volumes. Les commissions quant à elles sont en augmentation et reflètent surtout le recours croissant des clients à des solutions de placement alternatives. Les coûts d’exploitation sont en hausse en raison de l’augmentation du nombre d’employés et des frais liés à la mise en production de la nouvelle plateforme informatique, indique un communiqué.

According to the most recent statistics from Dealogic, large operations are rising again, boosting global activity since the beginning of the year, Les Echos reports. 18 operations of over USD10bn were announced between January and September 2013, totalling nearly USD550bn. But the global M&A market remains reduced in terms of the number of operations.

The Zurich-based LB(Swiss) Investment AG, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft (Switzerland), announced on 3 October that on 1 October it added a new business unit to its activities, namely the provision of representation for foreign funds in Switzerland. This comes in addition to activities to create and manage funds as well as compliance and risk management.As a centre of expertise, LB(Swiss) Investment offers its potential clients expertise in Swiss fund legislation, which permits the development of commercial strategy. In addition, the business model is designed to exclude conflicts of interest, particularly to avoid any situation of competition between the firm and its clients, Marcel Weiss, CEO, says.

At the official inauguration of new BlackRock premises on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, Martin Gut, country head for Switzerland, says that the US asset mangaement firm may soon employ considerably more than 100 people in Zurich and Geneva, compared with 80 currently, finews reports.This will be organic growth, after BlackRock acquired the multi-management activities of Swiss Re and the ETF activities of Credit Suisse, which made it possible to increase assets to nearly USD120bn.Gut has announced that BlackRock is also about to found a fund management and administration company in Switzerland. Talks with Finma are promising, the manager says.

According to Institutional Investors’ alpha, relaying the New York Times DealBlog, three more managers have left the hedge fund management firm SAC Capital Advisors, which is facing a lawsuit for insider trading. The three specialists, based in London, are Alidod Shirinbekov, Woei Chan and Paul Crouch.

A group of seasoned asset management professionals, Ezra Zask, Ralph DiMeo, Robert Krause, Wendy Robertson and Matthias Knab, who have already done more than 1,000 due diligence reports on hedge funds, have founded the platform Hedge Fund Due Diligence Exchange (HFDDX), which offers members an online marketplace to anonymously reconcile their needs with those of other participants, at http://www.hfddx.com/. When two or more members would like due diligence on the same fund, this reduces the cost proportionately.However, HFDDX does not recommend managers, and does not assist members to find funds which suit their needs.

La Française and Ofi AM on Thursday, 3 October announced that they are merging their incubation activities at NExT AM and NewAlpha AM. The new merged entity will have 49 investments, EUR1.3bn in cumulative seed money commitments, 26 active partners, and a total of EUR6.2bn in assets managed by 260 employees at partner asset management firms.NewAlpha AM is now 40% contorlled by La Française via its affiliate NExT AM, 25% by Ofi AM via NewAlpha Advisers, and 35% by the founders of NewAlpha AM within the entity NewAlpha Partners. NewAlpha AM will become the manager for third parties in the new ensemble, and will take over the management of the NExT Invest fund.The new entity, whose brand name has not yet been decided, aims to become the European leader in asset management incubation, “and one of the top two or three worldwide,” says the chairman of the board of NewAlpha AM, Antoine Rolland.

The U.S. institutional market is going to increase 30% to USD19 trillion in assets within the next 5 years, expects Cerulli Associates. As of year-end 2012, the institutional market held USD14.5 trillion in assets under management. «The shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) is continuing,» explains John Hsu, senior analyst at Cerulli. «DC markets continue to grow faster than DB markets and we anticipate that trend will continue."Cerulli highlights an opportunity for asset managers who have shifted their focus to DC to leverage existing relationships with corporate DB plan sponsors, allowing them to win DC mandates and potentially extend to custom target-date solutions.

Amundi would like to increase its assets in socially responsible investment from EUR66bn as of the end of June 2013, to EUR100bn, in two years, Yves Perrier, CEO of the asset management firm of the Crédit Agricole group, announced on Thursday at a press conference. As of 30 June, Amundi had a total of EUR750bn in assets under management. In order to develop its SRI assets, th asset management firm is planning to rely on two vectors. The first is the transformation of traditional funds into SRI funds, as have already been done in money markets (which now represent 37.76% of SRI assets). Pierre Schereck, director of corporate savings and SRI at Amundi, says, for example, that in employee savings, EUR10bn out of EUR20bn are not yet SRI and could be. The other vector is inflows, although Perrier claims that demand for SRI is “marginal,” particularly on the part of retail investors. Three quarters of SRI assets at Amundi are managed for institutional investors. At the conference, Perrier also discussed the choice to certify the firm’s SRI precedures with Afnor Certification, and to drop the Novethic labels. “There were disagreements about the procedure at Novethic, which has more exclusions than ours,” he explains. “The point of friction is the selectiveness rate,” Anne-Catherine Husson Traore, CEO of Novethic, confirms. Perrier also supports the creation of a European, rather than French, SRI label. SRI procedures at Amundi are based on environmental, social and governance analysis of 4,600 issuers. This makes it possible to construct portfolios with a universal best-in-class approach. Extra-financial research has also been made available to all managers, who are, however, not required to use it.

Clemens Reuter, head of UBS ETFs, has told Fondsprofessionell that his asset management firm has decided to cut the total expense ratios (TER) for several of its ETFs with effect from 16 September. In order for investors to be aware of the additional costs involved with synthetic replication ETFs, particularly costs related to the swap, UBS ETFs has also decided to publish a parallel “drag level” TER, in order to offer complete transparency. The “drag level” rate will be calculated by UBS once per year, on 31 July, and will apply for the following 12 months.

Following its acquisition of the ETF activities of Credit Suisse, iShares has modified its range of products on offer in the EMEA region (Europe, the Miiddle East and Africa), Investent Europe reports. As part of the changes, iShares will close 15 ETFs from 24 October 2013 for various reasons, particularly a lack of interest on the part of investors in these vehicles. The funds concerned include 89 funds from iShares and 7 funds from Credit Suisse.iShares has also repositioned the capitalisation versions of the iShares FTSE 100 UCITS ETF, iShares S&P 500 UCITS ETF and iShares S&P 500 - B UCITS ETF with a total expense ratio of 15 basis points, in order to meet rising demand from institutional investors for inexpensive and transparent ETFs. The versions of these products placed on sale have not been modified.

Hedge funds and other parallel banking operators are growing on the repurchasing market, as new rules render this activity less attractive for banks, the Financial Times reports. Among other players who are active in this area are Och-Ziff and Moore Capital, the newspaper says.

Finews reports that according to Reuters, Credit Suisse is said to be in the running to acquire the private banking activities of Société Générale in Asia. Ten banks submitted bids, including at least one US company, Credit Suisse, Standard Chartered, DBS and HSBC.The asset is estimated to be worth USD600m, with USD13bn in assets.

Chiow Wei Lee has resigned from his role as chief investment officer at Tokio Marine Asset Management International (TMAI), Citywire Global reports. His resonsibilities have been taken over by the current CEO, Kenji Kodama. Lee will leave his position on 13 November this year. Assets under management at TMAI total about USD3.5bn.

The alternative asset management entity UBS O’Connor (UBS group), whose assets under management total about USD5.2bn, is planning to open its first Asian hedge fund to investors by the end of the year, according to the news agency Bloomberg.The fund, which started the month of August with internal capital, is managed by John Bradshaw and David Perrett from New York.

Deutsche Börse will soon announce that it has admitted two new Luxembourg-registered ETFs to trading on the XTF segment of the Xetra electronic trading platform launched by ComStage, an affiliate of Commerzbank. The funds were founded on 30 September. One of them, the ComStage ETF FTSE China A50 UCITS ETF, replicates an index in US dollars of shares in mainland Chinese companies developed by FTSE; the other, the ComStage ETF MSCI World with EM Exposure net UCITS ETF, tracks an index of the 300 companies of the MSCI index most exposed to emerging markets.CharacteristicsName: ComStage ETF FTSE China A50 UCITS ETFISIN code: LU0947415054Total expense ratio: 0.50%Name: ComStage ETF MSCI World with EM Exposure net UCITS ETFISIN code: LU0947416961Total expense ratio: 0.40%

The Frankfurt-based asset management boutique Acatis Investment, whose assets total EUR2.1bn thanks to EUR685m in net subscriptions in the first eight months of 2013 (thus not counting inflows in September) unveiled the largest fund in the litter in Paris on 3 October, which is managed by Universal Investment and “sub-advised” by Gané AG of Aschaffenburg. The German-registered product, Acatis Gané Value Event Fund UI, has EUR785m in assets, and has attracted a net EUR400m since the beginning of the year, says Uwe Rathausky, one of the two founders and directors at Acatis.The portfolio, which now includes 25 positions with a turnover rate of 30%, is invested in equities, bonds and cash. For an investment, the team requires profits of 10% for each equity and 6% for each bond, and historically, the cash allocation has varied from 5% to 40%. The fund is currently 47% invested in equities (including 31% in US large caps), 16% in bonds (rated an average of BBB-), and 37% in cash.To describe the management style, Rathausky explains that he applies a value approach to the business, the management and the valuation, and complements this with an event-driven component, while refusing to use derivatives. The portfolio must have a considerably lower volatility than that of the equity markets, and a beta correlation of 0.30 to 0.60, also with respect to the equity market.CharacteristicsName: Acatis Gané Value Event Fund UIIsin Codes : DE000A0X751: A sharesDE000AIC5D13: B sharesDE000AIT73W9: C sharesBenchmark index: 50 % MSCI World Performance EUR/50 % EoniaFront-end fee:5% maximum (A and C shares)4% maximum (B shares)Management commission: 1.75%Performance commission: 20% of performance exceeding 6% (maximum 2% for the B share class)

New York-based Direxion on 3 October launched two leveraged ETFs which replicate the rising or falling performance of the Junior Gold Miners index from Market Vectors with 3 times leverage.The Direxion Daily Junior Fold Miners Index Bull 3X Shares (ticker: JNUG) aims for triple the daily performance of this index, while the Direxion Daily Junior Gold Miners Bear 3X Shares (JDST) is the inverse.The two funds charge fees of 0.95%.

Thanks to the good performance of the US and international markets, the average coverage rate for the liabilities of US corporate pension funds in the month of September rose 2.9 percentage points to 91%, a level not seen since June 2011, according to BNY Mellon Investment Strategy & Solutions Group (ISSG).“Getting above 90% is important for very many corporate retirement savings programmes, who as a result become more disposed to put strategies in place which can reduce exposure to market volatility,” says Jeffrey B. Saef, managing director at BNY Mellon Investment Management and head of ISSG.In the month under review, assets in funds increased by 3.1%. Liabilities fell by 0.2%, while the actualisation rate rose by 3 basis points to 4.81% for businesses rated Aa.

The manager of the hedge fund Pershing, Bill Ackman, bet USD1.5bn, or 15% of its total asets, on Herbalife. He short-sold the shares, betting the firm would go bankrupt, as he felt that the firm is an immense “Ponzi scheme.” But the rise in its share value has already cost him nearly one third of his bet, or USD500m in latent capital losses, Les Echos reports. This has weighed on the performance of Pershing, which lost 5% in third quarter, one of its worst declines. It has thus decided to retain only 60% of its short positions, and has also acquired long options on the firm.

There is a rising number of planned passports for Asian funds. After the Asia Region Funds Passport (ARFP) proposed 10 days ago (see Newsmanagers), the ASEAN capital markets forum (ACMF) has announced in a statement that the market authority of Malaysia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Thai market watchdog had signed a memorandum of understanding to create a cross-border range of collective investment schemes (OPC or CIS). In order to be eligible, candidate asset management firms must have at least USD500m in assets under management and must have been active for at least five years. This passport may be introduced during first half 2014, a statement says.