SRP held its Asia Pacific event last week, welcoming more than 350 attendees virtually. Let’s start this In Brief by looking back on some of the main headlines that impacted this market in recent days.

As a reminder, please find all award winners for the 2021 Apac awards ceremony here, and here for our panel coverage.

HSBC Private Banking has unveiled today an online trading platform for cash equities and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Asia, which aims to expand to listed structured products and structured notes by next year.

‘We expect to invest over US$100m in the next two years to build our core banking and digital platforms to meet the fast-changing wealth and lifestyle needs of our clients,’ said Siew Meng Tan, regional head of HSBC Private Banking, Asia-Pacific.   

The platform offers HSBC’s private banking clients in Asia access to real-time trading across Hong Kong SAR, China, Singapore, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, the UK, the US, Germany and France. It currently allows clients to directly invest in cash equities and ETFs from their mobile phones during exchange trading hours in each market with a daily cap at US$10m and up to US$2m per transaction.

On the product side of things, DBS Bank introduced CNY Note 6007 EYDG to investors in China. The six-month wealth management scheme is linked to the share of Medtronic, an American-Irish registered medical device company that primarily operates in the United States. If the closing price of the share on 15 December 2021 is at or above 125.17 points, the product pays a coupon of two percent. Otherwise, a coupon of 0.50% is paid.

UBS Australia has appointed Clinton Wong as co-head of equities with responsibility for the bank’s cash equities distribution and execution teams, which together trade more shares than any other stockbroker in Australia. Wong was most recently head of advisory sales and sales trading at the Swiss bank in Australia, and previously ran its cash equities desk. Wong replaces Steve Boxall, while Scott was appointed to the job last year. Both Wong and Scott will report to Taichi Takahashi offshore and Anthony Sweetman, co-CEO UBS Australia.

Delphine Leblond-Limpalaër, head of equity derivatives & solutions, UK institutions at Société Générale, since 2019, is understood to be joining Morgan Stanley. She joined the French bank as a proprietary trader and was latterly head of UK hedge fund equity derivative sales, in 2007, from VHC Partners Hedge Fund where she was an event driven analyst for two years. Colleague Michael Bayley is understood to be moving to BNP Paribas. He joined the French bank in 2012 as director, cross asset solutions, UK institutions covering quantitative investment strategies, risk premia, Solvency II solutions, cross asset structured products and equity derivatives for UK pension funds, insurers, asset managers and discretionary fund managers. Finally, Anthony Pike, a vice president in equity derivatives and cross asset sales at the French bank, is set to join Barclays in a similar position. He joined the French bank’s equity derivatives sales team in 2015 after three years at from J.P. Morgan where he was part of the US bank’s equities derivatives group.

Following the acquisition of Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME) in 2020 and, subject to regulatory approval, Six Swiss Exchange will migrate BME’s current trading platform to a version of its existing platform to establish the future trading platform technology set-up for both companies.

In a first step, trading and trading-related services for equities, equity-like and fixed income instruments will be harmonised on the Six trading platform by ‘extending and optimising the current capabilities to also address the Spanish market’s needs’. The scope of the harmonisation process does not include derivative instruments. The migration of equities, equity-like and fixed income instruments is expected to be completed between Q4 2022 and Q2 2023.

Last but certainly not least, our final highlighted article takes a look at the Eurostoxx 50 index, one of the most widely used underlying assets in the structured products market globally, and its rough ride as product issuers accelerate the de-risking of their trading books.

The European flagship index has appeared consistently in the global top three underlying ranking over the last five years and, in 2020, was also among the top five underlyings globally by market share. However, since early 2020 the Eurostoxx50 has seen a steady decline in sales which has been followed by a dramatic fall in issuance since the beginning of 2021 – as a result more than €6 billion has not been reinvested in the index.

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