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Managing the new world under AIFM

Feedback from leading practitioners collected at the Alceda Annual Investor forum on the 10th of April in Frankfort.

When it comes to the implementation of the AIFMD, in what way does the directive affect your job on a daily basis?

Manuela Fr¶hlich, Head of Sales Alceda: It is product development and the offering of products and gives us the chance as the Alceda UCITS platform or Alceda to onboard asset managers under the new directive and actually open them chances to globally distribute them. Managers are forced to decide on how they approach the European investors from a marketing perspective. Navigating the sophisticated marketing and distribution regimes for AIFs will be a key challenge.

Brian McMahon, Managing Director Business Development EMEA, BNY Mellon: I would certainly say it is a daily conversation. For your background information: BNY has about 27 trillion under custody, so you can imagine a lot of our clients have custody relationships with us and from an AIFMD perspective they are looking to push us in terms of how we are working with them and how we are working with our clients. A lot of our clients still require a bit of education.

We did a survey of our clients about 8-9 weeks ago. At that stage 81 % of our clients had yet to apply to the AIFMD. And if we look at where we are today and I look at the 27th of July coming quite quickly we have a massive network with our current clients to actually just onboard them and everyone moving in that time frame. It is a constant education process and client's engagement process around the models that they are going to employ them forward.

Georg Reutter, Kepler Partner: We have seen enormous inflows into UCITS, in particular the last 12- 18 months it is really becoming the brand that Brian McMahon has been talking about. And I think AIFMD for me and my business represents the next step in that process.

How it will sit alongside by the UCITS, it will be quite interesting. There will be for me an obvious way of how they sit next to each other. UCITS take the liquid strategies and AIFMD takes the less liquid strategies and I think that can be a very interesting mix for investors looking at it that way in the future.

Dr. Joachim Kayser, PwC: I spend exactly 33.3% of my working with AIFMD and I tell you why. We advise on high end institutional business and there now, like you mentioned, the alternative investments become increasingly interesting in this low interest environment. Real assets, alternative investments have become more important and that's even going to increase.

However the investment regulation is not the only aspect that has to be taken into consideration, there is as well taxation because most of these institutional investors, unless they are pension funds, insurance companies and CTA's are taxable. Another third of my time is consumed by tax structuring and compliance and the third and that is the next hill which is going to come is the investor regulation which governs these types of investors and that is currently the domestic insurance regulatory law in Germany.