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Guillaume Touze Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva for New Managers:

A former Barclays executive talks about starting a UCITS boutique in London, investing in emerging market debt, and the impact of Brexit on his funds.

Before founding Quadra Capital, French-born manager Guillaume Touze spent most of his career with the Barclays Group, which he joined in the 90s. He ended up running Barclay's asset management business in Europe. As the firm launched its first UCITS in 1998, around the start of the Euro currency, much of his experience lies in managing UCITS.

In 2010, a number of friends within the asset management and insurance industries told him they wanted to invest in hedge funds, but would prefer a boutique that supplied vehicles with much more liquidity. Liquidity was not exactly what hedge funds normally offered back then.

"The idea stayed in my mind," he tells Opalesque. "When Barclays became less exciting in 2013, we talked about building something that would be a slightly unusual animal, with several institutional investors at the beginning, that would go the UCITS route to provide liquid alternatives to the European investor base, with a vehicle out of Luxembourg that would be flexible and useable for everyone." And Touze did jus......................

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