
Over at Caceis, chief executive Jean-François Abadie is similarly upbeat. “Without giving anything away, we are anticipating a good year. I think we are going to post excellent results,” he says. “At the mid-year point, we were already over budget with a significant increase in all businesses. “Overall it has been a good year. We have been very active in terms of commercial development. Commission development has also been good and on the treasury side, we have been managing this very actively, which compensates for the still dreadful interest rates.” Abadie says he was pleased to see “a good variety of developments in new areas”. These include securing important business in Italy, Germany and Switzerland and the UK. The UK client has not been named – all Abadie will say is that it is not a private equity house – but winning the firm’s first contract with a UK-registered fund is a good start, he says. “In business, starting somewhere is often the hardest contract to win because you have to build some kind of credibility and you have got to work a lot,” he adds. “Once you have got noticed in a new region, you have got to wait a bit because the other players in the region are going to wait for the risk-taker to confirm that it was a good move. Then things start picking up speed.” Caceis’s recent expansion in Italy means it now has a full-service fund administration ability (for example in custody services) “which was not the case two years ago”. While Caceis has not been involved in any significant acquisition over the past 12 months, Abadie says that the firm is “actively working on various opportunities”. “The last year has been good in terms of business development, but on the acquisition front we are clearly in the market to look at the opportunities,” he explains. “We have been developing extremely well in the organised derivative market and equity finance. We have been moving from classical asset servicing towards being a global provider of front-to-back services, including execution services and so forth.” Abadie agrees with Dubois at BNPPSS that competition is about as tough as it has ever been. “Margins are going down in any case, but to maintain them as much as possible, the fight is pretty severe with our friends and competitors,” he says. “This is because there is huge competition in the market and of course, we do not have captive clients. In fact, Amundi is an extremely demanding client – which is good, as we cannot afford any complacency in delivering our services.” Dynamic
Etienne Deniau, head of strategic marketing at Societe Generale Securities Services (SGSS), says business has been “quite positive, with a good dynamic” in the past 12 months. “Our commercial results globally are in advance of our targets for 2018,” he says. “Luxembourg and the UK have been particularly dynamic this year. “In the UK, we have invested a lot and targeted financial intermediaries, asset managers, private wealth managers, and that investment has paid off.” SGSS gained an important mandate with the Dutch asset management firm Transtrend – an achievement that Jean-François Marchand, SGSS’s commercial director for France, said stemmed from the bank’s ability to provide AIF depositary services. The Dutch asset manager has funds domiciled in both Luxembourg and Dublin; Marchand says that securing this mandate was a “significant” deal for services in Luxembourg. “We are developing a lot in the Irish market, where we now provide the whole range of fund services out of Dublin and where we now employ around 50 people,” says Marchand. On the impact of Brexit on the industry, the number of asset management staff being moved from the UK to France (or elsewhere in continental Europe) has so far been “tens, not hundreds”, says Marchand. “We are seeing small teams coming to Paris but not huge numbers.” Referring to another of SGSS’s important mandates, this time with UBS subsidiary La Maison de Gestion, he says: “We have now moved up the value chain to offer front and middle-office solutions. We are not even the custodian: we have just delivered a portfolio management system, a front-office system.” This article first appeared in Funds Europe ©2018 funds global mena