Bellevue Group has entered Switzerland's retail structured products market with a new CHF-denominated tracker certificate linked to the BB Nanos Investment Swiss Compounders Basket.
The an independent Swiss financial boutique, which is listed on the Six Swiss Exchange, has been planning to enter the structured products market for some time but was seeking to do it with lead order to cover some of the cost of the issuance, according to Florian Streiff (pictured), senior sales equity and equity derivatives, Bank am Bellevue.
"Now we have registered a programme to be able to issue structured certificates in the category of participation products," said Streiff. "We are not planning to become another mass issuer and offer thousands of products in the retail channel of the Swiss market, but to be selective and build a range of tailor-made products that respond to requests from clients or have been developed on the back of our in house research and asset management subsidiary (healthcare and biotechnology) adding value to our clients."
As a niche provider in the area of structured products, Bellevue Group will focus on strategies that are in line with its active equity investment strategies as well as leveraging its expertise in regional growth markets, healthcare and other topics, said Streiff.
Bellevue's first structured product is an actively-managed certificate developed in collaboration with external adviser, Daniele Scilingo, from Crossbow Partners, which will advise the underlying asset allocation strategy that focuses on so called compounders (companies that exhibit high return on capital, have the ability to generate a significant amount of free cash flow and find opportunities to reinvest it) predominantly in Switzerland.
"The certificate has the flexibility to extract additional yield with call-writing strategies and protect against capital losses during delicate market phases via derivative strategies," said Streiff. "The underlying asset is not an index, but an actively-managed basket of shares which follows a similar approach to an entrepreneur: concentrated, long-term and high quality."
The Nanos Investment Swiss Compounders Basket is a dynamic, actively-managed notional Swiss franc portfolio based on Swiss and European stocks, cash, options and hedging instruments administered by Nanos Investment, a unit of Crossbow Partners which acts as the basket adviser. The underlying strategy is aimed at investing in corporates which are assigned a compunder status by a proprietary scoring model called nanos investment compounding efficiency score (nice-score). The underlying strategy allows the 'basket advisor' to completely hedge market exposure via the use of derivative strategies against specific market behaviour such as statiscally unfavourable seasonalities.
The product also features a putable/callable payoff which enables investors and the issuer to redeem the product before maturity after 12 months from the product's strike onwards. "As equity investment professionals, we aim to generate consistent above-average investment returns for our clientele through active investment services in selected markets and themes," said Streiff. "We have a couple of new structures in the pipelines which will be launched next year."
Established in 1993, Bellevue Group covers brokerage, corporate finance and asset management via its subsidiaries, Bellevue Asset Management AG and Bank am Bellevue AG.
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