Wealth & Finance Finance Awards 2015

www.wealthandfinance-intl.com 7 Tell us about your staff and the other institutions you partner with. How do you ensure your high standards are maintained throughout your business? The staff we employ are also of vital importance to our work, and we chose our staff carefully. Each manager at Invescap has several decades of investment experience, as investors, as asset managers and/ or as advisors both in Switzerland and internationally. All of them also have extensive academic credentials. We also have a rapidly growing asset management and advisory business in addition to the creation of specific investment products. In addition to an outstanding curriculum, both in terms of academic credentials and education, when we hire, we seek for passion, curiosity, creativity, confidence, the willingness to think out of the box, an open mind and a deep desire to provide a long lasting contribution to the financial industry. As the exchange of information and related discus- sions can occasionally be rich and intense, good inter-personal skills and a generally well balanced life are appealing to Invescap. Those qualitative characteristics are vitally important for a company operating in such market, as they ensure all of our staff are well rounded and able to deal with the wide variety of clients we serve. An organization benefiting from such in-depth knowledge and experi- ence is an excellent starting point for new product development, which enables us to regularly enhance our already impressive product portfo- lio, and offer a wider range to our clients. In addition our partnerships with top universities, research centres and the most reputable financial institutions worldwide ensures we are always able to recruit the top manager in the industry and the complementarity of skills, experience and rigour in what we do, enables us to propose innovative investment solutions confidently. Cultivating relationships with institutions working within our industry is particularly vital to our business, as it helps to ensure that we are at the very forefront of emerging market developments. As such we have more than 20 active business relationships with internationally renowned financial institutions which we selected based on their know-how on various product ranges. As we interact with them and provide them with significant business volumes, we have access to the very best special- ists in each of them. They are always willing to invest time and efforts to help us achieving the best investment results and in return they benefit from our knowhow and expertise. As a result, this combination skill set and experience enables Invescap to offer superior investment products to its clients. Working in such a fast paced industry, how do you ensure your firm remains at the forefront of industry developments? The finance industry is diverse and fast paced but an investor’s ob- jectives and concerns remain relatively constant in time. For example, investors always want to make investments which are positively skewed. Thus instead of performing a straight equity investment where they would exposed to the upside as well as the entire downside, they will typically prefer an investment an equity investment which offers a maximal participation on the upside within an investment product that also offers strong capital preservation characteristics in the case of a market downfall. Therefore the investor wins if the market goes up and preserves its capital otherwise. With regards to fixed income investments, they prefer to select a higher yielding investment coming from the exposure on a number of very low risks as opposed to a similar yield coming from the exposure to a single high risk exposure. For this type of investment products, we use cate- gories of risks which proved to be highly resilient in 2008 and 2009. Those risks are key components of our fixed income investment prod- ucts. The objective of generating good returns for investors coupled with a strong capital preservation bias within an investment product are highly appreciated by our clients. In order to achieve this, Invescap has one of the highest proportion of research & development in relation to its income in the industry. How do you benchmark your business? By what standards or criteria do you measure your success, both with regards to individual clients or projects, or as a business as a whole? Benchmarking against our competitors within the industry is important to ensure that other aspects of our business align with other firms in the industry. The ability to generate positive investment returns for investors while also offering investment products that display strong capital preservation features is a definite measure of success on a product by product basis, and we keep a close eye on this aspect of our work. On a business scale, the growth of the clientele, its diversification, the development of business with each client are key indicators of success at Invescap. We are also interacting almost on a daily basis with our key clients in order to help them achieve their investment objectives. Refer- rals are also a measure of recognition and credibility and, ultimately, of success in our business, so we benchmark ourselves in these areas to ensure we are always at the top of our industry. What does the future hold, both for your firm and your industry? Our industry faces a number of developments in the future which will vastly affect our firm, with the globalization process now connecting financial markets as never before and the computerization of the indus- try, exemplified by program trading and comparable form of computer programs, will accelerate the flow of information and magnify market impact more today that at any other time in history. Since market information is coming randomly from anywhere in the world, the market impact of such information is magnified, resulting in market crashes occurring more frequently and faster than ever before. An equity market correction of 5% twenty years ago may very well be a 15% or 20% crash today considering all other factors equal. In addition, since so many different market participants are now involved in any part of the world, it is very difficult to have any predictive view on any financial markets. For example, a tsunami in any part of the world or political instability in a specific region can have disastrous consequences on portfolios over- night and random repetitions of similar events are weary to investors and lead to irrational decisions all too often. It now becomes increasing- ly difficult for investors to take a buy and hold view of the market and to keep the needed confidence level to meet investment objectives. This is now true for the vast majority of the investment community, but especially critical for categories of investors who need to grow assets in view of retirement or are retired and need stable investment returns. This is also the case for an increasing investor base that needs additional income to compliment a lifestyle, for realizing a life project, for college education or for inheritance purposes. Diversification of investments is certainly part of the solution to this new paradigm but we also believe that investment strategies that take into account as many extreme risk scenarios as possible, in the conceptual phase of an investment product, an investment fund or an investment strategy, are essential nowadays.