Strategy
From The Editor’s Chair: Mergers, New Regulations And Effective Impact
In another addition to our menu, the editor looks at the most recent news and flags what's in the works for coverage this week.
The New Year started off pretty much as 2022 ended – with economists wondering how much further interest rate rises would go up and what the likely effect of a re-opened China economy would be. In our coverage last week, we published a raft of investment commentaries from firms such as UBS, Janus Henderson, DBS and Carmingnac, among others. In all the time that I’ve been editing this site (since March 2008), wealth managers never lose the desire to make predictions, even if they are hedged with the usual health warnings!
The first few days of 2023 saw several M&A deals in the US and Europe being completed, with the Tiedemann-Alvarium marriage of two multi-family offices being the biggest deal of the lot; a few other US wealth firms also completed their unions. Last year saw a bit of a drop-off in the pace of deals because markets became choppier. It will be interesting to see what happens this year. In the US, our correspondent for Family Wealth Report, Charles Paikert, is exploring the Tiedemann-Alvarium deal and will be reporting on the views of industry figures on the space.
WealthBriefing couldn’t resist reminding readers last week that 2023 is a big deal in Switzerland because the final phase of new regulations on external asset managers kick in. We’ve been busy covering this process over recent years and I expect more details to emerge on how well EAMs are shaping up. (Please let us know how your EAM is getting on if you work in the space.)
In our European coverage, this week starts with an interview with a UK private markets platform – PM Alpha – explaining how it helps advisors to put types of investment on the client menu. Later this week, and staying in the UK, there’s going to be an interview with the UK-based Global Returns Project, which focuses on making impact-style investments more professional and easier to manage. We’ve also got a video interview in the works with an expert about the compliance challenges that company directors face – something that never goes away. My colleague Amanda Cheesley has a raft of more asset allocation commentaries from wealth managers to share.
We are keeping a weather eye on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the state of the energy market and China-West relations, among other topics. I’ll single out the annual World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland (January 16 to 20) as an event likely to produce a fair amount of commentary. And later in January the big US banks will start to publish their fourth-quarter financial results, when we get a chance to see how rising interest rates have affected their results. Several banks, most obviously Credit Suisse (see a story here), know they have the challenge of turning matters around in 2023 after a difficult past 12 months.
In Asia, we are covering what wealth managers think of the loosening of China/Hong Kong border controls as pandemic regulations are eased, and we have already had plenty of reactions. It's going to be interesting to see data on how this change affects the banking and wealth sector in coming weeks.
As ever, to get in touch, email tom.burroughes@wealthbriefing.com