It’s been an active week for appointments in Asia Pacific, and for news on the resurging popularity of structured products.

HSBC Private Banking announced the appointments of Jeffrey Yap as head of investment services and product solutions (ISPS), Southeast Asia, while Adam Lau will take up a newly-created role as regional head of markets solutions, Asia Pacific.

Yap, who is promoted from his current role of regional head of fixed income, currencies and commodity, Asia Pacific (and has been with HSBC since 2017), will lead the investment services and product solutions team in Southeast Asia for HSBC Private Banking. Lau joined HSBC in 2018 from Natixis where he was head of Greater China for equity solutions sales.

The UK private bank has made a number of high-profile senior appointments over the last few months including that of Lavanya Chari as global head of products, investments and collaboration, HSBC Private Banking, and Sharon Oh as chief operating officer, HSBC Private Banking Asia Pacific, in April.

Staying in Asia, BNP Paribas Asset Management (BNP AM) has appointed Steven Billiet as head of Asia Pacific, with effect from 8 August. He succeeds Ligia Torres, who is retiring from the firm and will return to Europe in August. Billiet joined BNP Paribas AM earlier this year as head of distribution Asia Pacific and will retain his regional distribution responsibilities in addition to his role of head of the region.

AIS Financial Group has hired Mina Lazic as relationship manager, cross-asset structured products sales. Based in Geneva, she will report directly to founder Samir Lakkis. Lazic has 12 years of experience in global markets sales, having previuoslty worked at Nomura, Société Générale and Merrill Lynch.

JP Morgan has hired Fredrik Giertz as vice president, equity derivatives structuring, in a newly-created role to implement machine learning technology in its investable indices business. He will be based in London and work within JP Morgan’s investable index franchise, and responsible for growing and developing quantitative investment strategies (QIS) that use machine-learning techniques.

UBS’ chief investment officer has spoken out in favour of structured products, arguing that investors should harness market turbulence to enter defensively instead of shying away from volatility. The Swiss bank recommends investors harness market turbulence to invest defensively by using three approaches if they are concerned about the risk of bad market timing, but who also want to manage opportunity cost: establish a schedule for averaging into risk assets; consider put-writing strategies to take advantage of dip-buying opportunities; and using structured investments.

The benefits of structured products have also been highlighted by UK financial adviser firm Lowes Financial Management. It released a 10-year research on UK structured products proving that they have delivered gains and matched investor expectations. According to the research, some 4,444 structured products were sold between January 2010 and December 2019 in the UK market via the country’s preferred wrapper, the structured product plan – of these, 3,895 matured within the entire UK retail sector, delivering an average annualised return of 6.98% whereas structured deposits returned 3.64%.

A new Irish fund of structured products, Ballybunion Insignia Defined Returns Fund, has reported its first successful autocall in June. Peter Murphy, founder and managing director at Insignia Financial, the company behind the fund, said the Pharma Note, the first trade in the fund, matured after three months with a 5.4% return.

The principal amount was reinvested into a similar Pharma Note with a slightly lower coupon of 4.425% per quarter.

“This new note had a defensive call barrier, which we think is appropriate currently,” said Murphy. “We also added a much smaller new note of around 2.5% of the net asset value to the portfolio, which was a step-down autocall on IAG, with an annual coupon of 42%.”

Image: Alex Knight / Unsplash