Three steps to European fund sales as easy as C-D-C

French funds house gets serious about distribution with three-stage plan.

CDC Ixis Asset Management, the E300bn funds arm of the French banking group, has launched a wide-ranging cross-border distribution strategy to increase its tiny slice of the retail cake. Currently, 95 per cent of the E160bn assets sourced from the European market are from institutional clients, with just 5 per cent from a small band of distributors. Hervé Guinamant, board member responsible for business development, recently appointed Sébastien Masson, who has top level experience in both asset management and investment banking at Société Générale, to step up the European push. “This is a new direction for CDC in Europe and the idea is to launch the activity over three stages,” Mr Masson told PWM. These are:

• An initial focus on the French domestic market
• An “opportunistic” policy in other countries
• Identifying and pursuing 500 to 600 key clients in Europe, predominantly fund of fund managers, private banking networks, French, Austrian and Belgian financial advisers and Swiss family offices. The French funds house already works with Allfunds Bank in Spain and Italian bank SanPaolo IMI, which has a 3.5 per cent stake in Mr Masson’s parent bank, CDC Ixis. “It is always easier to work with your shareholders,” admits Mr Masson. CDC Ixis AM is about to launch three to six new products for the domestic market with different distributors. One of these is a capital guaranteed product launched in partnership with an insurance company. This puts the asset management arm in direct competition with the capital markets branch of its parent institution, said Mr Masson. Similar products will then be rolled out, with local wrappers, for the Belgian, Swiss and Spanish markets. “For a French producer like us, it is easy to work with partners in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Spain,” said Mr Masson. “Working in Germany is not so easy.”