LRI Group, an independent investment services company, has added six new managers to its UCITS Platform, forecasting approximately EUR12 billion in Assets under Management (AuM) in 2017.
Markets in 2017 have remained volatile and uncertain due to major changes affecting the institutional and alternative management industry, however LRI Group believes that there are still plenty of attractive opportunities for managers during such turbulent times.
The growing appetite of LRI Group’s fund business emerged from an increase in global asset management clients and in particular a stronger global distribution network of investors and asset managers. In addition to the total range of legal fund structures available in Luxembourg, this also includes distribution partners in Asia, Australia, Europe, the U.S. and Latin America as well as access to an institutional investor network.
The new managers in financial assets include: M17 Capital Management, P.A.M Prometheus Asset Management, QC Partners, SK Asset Management, TAO Alternatives and Torendo Capital Partners GmbH. Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were the dominating countries of origin. As a result, the fund range has expanded rapidly over the past year to include classic equity and fixed income strategies, multi-asset funds and liquid alternative approaches.
Michael Sanders (pictured), Managing Director of LRI Invest SA, says: “We have had an extremely successful year at LRI Group adding new managers to our UCITS Platform and AIFM Platform, and we expect this to continue as we go into 2018.
“Our pipeline in Real Assets has also increased this year, ranging from Real Estate, Private Equity, Debt to Renewable Energy projects. We are currently in the process of launching several Reserved Alternative Investment Funds (RAIF), alongside Specialised Investment Funds (SIF) and securitisations. This also includes the biggest deal in the history of our securitisation platform – a transaction of over USD300 million.
“We now have a widely diversified network of distributors, placement agents and consultants who – if they meet certain criteria – are responsible for distributing our partners’ funds in selected countries. With this service, LRI Group provides significant and unique value that benefits not only initiators but also the connected distributors who have a strong interest in presenting exciting yet unknown strategies to their investors.
“As LRI Group looks to 2018, we aim to expand our services further into seeding companies. We see this as a timely opportunity given that fund managers with offshore vehicles from North America, Asia and Europe usually have the problem of generating appropriate seed money. Although the track record of the investment strategy is in place, entry barriers into new markets are high due to the different diversification requirements on the investor side. We believe that a solid partner network of seed money would allow the launch of new and innovative products that otherwise would not have the opportunity due to the low initial volume.
“Real-estate-debt-mandates is another opportunity for investors, and an asset class that is anticipated to increase in the regulated environment of Solvency II. It also became apparent that among the regulated investors, Luxembourg vehicles such as the Specialised Investment Fund (SIF) are still popular, with new vehicles such as the Reserved Alternative Investment Fund (RAIF) introduced in 2016 are experiencing strong growth.”
