This was the week of the SRP Asia Pacific 2025 Conference, which was held for the 12th year on 10 June in Hong Kong.
Topics discussed by market participants included the influence of the current macroeconomic conditions on the effectiveness and relevance of structured products in today’s market, the wealth management landscapes of Hong Kong and Singapore, index innovation and digital assets in the Apac structured products market, among others.
Nicolas Rigois, global head, capital market products and solutions at Standard Chartered Bank estimated that 20 to 40% of wealth management revenue in today’s market is coming from structured products while according to Sean Kim, executive director, Apac lead of index structured product at MSCI, private banks and wealth clients are the biggest drivers of custom indices in the Apac region.
The event concluded with an awards ceremony where Barclays, Crédit Agricole CIB, FinIQ, J.P. Morgan, KGI Securities and Société Générale were among the winners.
These themes illustrate our top-down and bottom-up approaches - Irene Bellomo, Kepler Cheuvreux Solutions
In product news, Kepler Cheuvreux Solutions and Unicredit collaborated to launch a new series of thematic certificates designed for the Italian retail market.
The themes for the first three issues in this series are the reconstruction of Ukraine, Italian excellence and Italian infrastructure, respectively, which are accessible via three Cash Collect Worst-of Autocallable Certificates that can be traded on the Sedex segment of Borsa Italiana.
“These themes illustrate our top-down and bottom-up approaches,” Irene Bellomo, CFA, head of Italy and Ticino at Kepler Cheuvreux Solutions told SRP.
Certificate volumes in the Italian market in the first quarter of 2025, at €7 billion (from 538 products), were the highest recorded for a single quarter since the historical high in Q4 2023, according to the latest figures released by the Italian association for certificates and investment products (Associazione Italiana Certificati e Prodotti di Investimento – Acepi).
Since the start of 2006 - when Acepi first started recording sales and issuance data for the Italian primary market - volumes exceeded the current total only once, in Q4 2023 when €8 billion was collected from 487 products, the association’s statistics show.
In Finland, OP Yrityspankki Oyj issued a 5.5-year capital protected bond linked to the Shiller Barclays Global Index while in France, another capital protection product, this time wrapped as a fund and tied to MSCI EMU ESG Rating Screened Sustainable Tilt Select 40 5% Decrement Index, was distributed via Natixis Investment Managers International, the Caisse D'Epargne network and the branches of Banque Populaire Régionales.
Over in the US, cash-settled single stock notes have become popular with institutional investors. SRP recorded 31 structured notes with such payoff issued since 2018, which together collected US$4.7 billion, translating to an averaged size of US$152.6m.
Fintech IVM Markets is urging distributors to overcome the challenges of communicating risk metrics in structured products and take new approaches beyond headline high coupon rates.
“Investors and advisors often focus solely on coupon rates to avoid having to face lengthy documents to understand metrics,” the company’s co-founder Volodymyr Gubskyi told SRP.
The European structured products market is struggling to understand where the Retail Investment Strategy (RIS) framework falls as it is not offering an adequate solution to the challenges the EU economy and financial markets are facing, according to Thomas Wulf, secretary general of the European Structured Investment Products Association (Eusipa) in an exclusive interview with SRP.
Finally, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is proposing to lift the ban on offering crypto exchange traded notes (cETNs) to retail investors. According to the regulator, cETNs could be sold to individual consumers rather than just professional investors in the UK if they’re traded on an FCA-approved investment exchange, under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.
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