Societe Generale has entered into a new partnership with Investec Structured Products in the UK aimed at the joint distribution of the French bank's collateralised structured products to retail market via financial advisors, with Investec acting as plan manager and co-distributor.
The two banks will collaborate on the regular tranche-based collateralised offering, with greater distribution coverage for the product range, while allowing two of the largest brands in UK retail to combine. "Investec will provide plan management services for our UK 4 structured products range which has been our flagship offering in the UK IFA market for a number of years," said Zak de Mariveles (pictured), head of UK IFA sales at SG. "Under the agreement, Investec will further distribute these products through its significant IFA distribution channel.
"This new partnership allows us to build on the last five years, ensuring we deliver a first class proposition to IFAs," said de Mariveles. "This partnership allows us to expand our reach in the UK retail market, as well as offering the chance to broaden our core range of products, which now includes seven structured plans with the most popular payoffs in this market."
SG's range of products will now be available throughout the year on a rolling basis, according to de Mariveles. "This also allows us to diversify our product range across different plan managers as we will continue to work with our partners at Walker Crips, and provides the IFA community with a larger sales support infrastructure," said de Mariveles.
The French bank has retained its position as the third most active provider of structured products in the UK market, with over 75 structures marketed year to date. "It has been a challenging environment for structured products with, for example, the FTSE trading close to 7,500, and a tough low interest rate and low volatility environment," said de Mariveles. "This continues to affect pricing and can limit the returns on offer, but, on the other hand, sees a majority of knockout products maturing with impressive returns, and, ultimately, this means happy investors, which, in turn, translates into new products being rolled over."
The French bank's initiatives this year include the launch of a flagship range of products linked to the FTSE 100 Fixed Dividend Equal Weight index. The index, designed by SG and created, calculated and published by FTSE, was developed specifically with structured products in mind and launched with Walker Crips as plan manager, "and has been well received in the market", according to de Mariveles. "In parallel, we have seen Societe Generale sponsor the new VT SG UK Defined Return Assets Fund, seeing us moving strategically into the more traditional fund space, with a new UK-domiciled Ucits fund, with a very similar look and feel to the popular FTSE Autocall, but within a fund format," said de Mariveles.
SG has marketed over 700 structured products in the UK, of which 220 are still live and has been at the forefront of developments in the London Stock Exchange ETP listed market over the last two years, which has led to the launch of the SG Twenty20 Global Explorer ETN, a smart tracker note linked to the performance of a basket of exchange-traded funds that are updated on a monthly basis, launched on December 2015; as well as the introduction of a range of credit-linked notes, which was followed by a suite of short & leverage ETPs.
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