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General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm, has appointed Samir Assaf as a Senior Advisor.
He will also serve as a member of the Advisory Board for BeyondNetZero, General Atlantic’s new climate venture. Based in London, Samir brings with him more than three decades of financial services experience and will advise on a range of areas, including sourcing, developing relationships with entrepreneurs around the world and portfolio company support.
Assaf spent 27 years at HSBC in a number of key leadership roles. Most recently, he was the Chairman of Corporate and Institutional Banking, with responsibility for strengthening HSBC’s ties
European Food Tech venture capital firm Five Seasons Ventures has announced the final closing of a EUR180 million second fund.
The new Fund II will continue making Series A and B investments into the most promising European Food Tech companies, with an emphasis on fast-growing consumer-focused food with a quantifiable environmental or social impact. Fund II was raised on the back of a very successful Fund I portfolio of European Food Tech champions.
Five Seasons Ventures’ investment thesis is to prove that Food Tech startups can grow at the same speed as ‘traditional’ tech startups. Only the top 10 per
Development Partners International (DPI), an investment firm focused on Africa, has raised USD900 million for African Development Partners III Fund (ADP III), exceeding its USD800 million target. The find also attracted an additional USD250 million of dedicated co-investment capital, bringing a total of USD1.15 billion for investments on the continent.
London-based Fintech Crezco, a UK open banking payment solution designed to make B2B invoice payments as convenient as B2C card payments without the costs collected by companies like Visa and MasterCard, has raised GBP3 million in a seed funding round.
Founded in 2020 by Ralph Rogge and Igor Pikovsky of Rogge Global Partners – a USD60 billion bond fund which was sold to Allianz in 2016 – Crezco has already established unique partnerships with Xero, QuickBooks and other B2B platforms for invoice payments for millions of SMEs across the UK and Europe.
Rogge brings his previous experience of successfully building
ClearCourse Partnership (ClearCourse), a group of technology companies providing useful, integrated software solutions, is to acquire EKM, a leading provider of e-commerce and online retail software.
The acquisition strengthens ClearCourse’s e-commerce and online retail capabilities and sees the Company join the Group’s Business Services division.
Founded in 2002, EKM provides the UK’s leading independent e-commerce platform, delivering software that powers over GBP350 million of transactions annually for its customer base of SME online retailers. EKM’s system offers a full suite of e-commerce solutions, with capabilities including online shop design and visitor conversion tools. Following the acquisition, EKM and its
AnaCap Financial Partners (AnaCap), a specialist mid-market investor, has closed two performing loan transactions in Spain from of its fourth Credit Opportunities fund.
The first investment is a portfolio of ~55,000 point-of-sale originated consumer loans, with a significant portion originating from the health and dental sector. The second investment is a non-core disposal of point-of-sale-originated auto and consumer loans from one of Spain’s largest banks, believed to be the first non-core bank disposal of performing auto loans in the Spanish market.
Both deals represent ~EUR200 million face value in seasoned, granular performing portfolios, where AnaCap has a long-standing track record
If any jurisdiction can claim to be the home of the global fund industry, it is Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy is the second largest investment fund centre worldwide and the first in Europe, with an 8.8 per cent global market share in 2020 and is a prime location for alternative investment funds.
Yves Cheret, managing director of fund administration in CSC’s Luxembourg office comments: “I think that, over time, the investment fund business in Luxembourg will become known as the US is known.”
Luxembourg’s attraction for fund managers is based on its political, financial, and political stability which fosters a
Visitors to Luxembourg are often surprised and pleased to discover that public transport is free. Step onto a tram in Luxembourg city, and there is no conductor to pay, and no machine to stamp tickets.
In a drive to tackle traffic congestion and emissions, last year the Grand Duchy introduced a new policy where no charge exists for using the trains, trams and buses that criss-cross the small country sandwiched between Germany, France and Belgium.
The policy is an attractive perk for its 602,000 residents, 175,000 cross-border workers and 1.2 million annual tourists.
It’s also emblematic of something else: Luxembourg’s
By Dr Marcus Peter & Irina Stoliarova – 2020 was a challenging year for the Luxembourg funds market. Despite a strong start in January and February, the Covid-19 pandemic caused a slowdown to fund set-up and net asset developments due to valuation issues and travel restrictions. However, it should be noted that the Luxembourg investment fund industry remained robust given the market regained growth starting mid-2020 and continuing into the third quarter of 2021.
This positive development was driven predominantly by increasing net assets and incoming new commitments to the fund vehicles. Net assets under management in Luxembourg investment funds
By Stephane Pesch – The private equity and venture capital industries have shown tremendous growth and have attracted lots of attention and new investors over the last years due to their inherent qualities (strong performance and returns, long term approach, focus on value creation, financing of the real economy and innovation).
Thriving sectors embed lots of upsides and allow practitioners and future practitioners to be exposed to a high pace (certainly correlated with hard work and robust initial skills), quite agile and forward-thinking industries (e.g. at the forefront of technology and other investment trends), intellectually enriching activities and experiences, varied tasks
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