The SRP Europe Conference 2023 took place in London on 8-9 March.

Head to our website for the coverage of the awards and of the panels. Thank you to everyone who supported the 2023 Europe conference. 

The Personality of the Year Award was presented to Stefan Bollinger at the 20th Europe Awards Ceremony, which took place on the evening of Wednesday 8 March. Bollinger got involved in the structured products market almost three decades ago.

The Global Financial Crisis was one of the biggest moments for the financial industry - Stefan Bollinger, Goldman Sachs

Bollinger started his career in 1993 at Zurcher Kantonalbank where he helped manage the bank's Swiss franc swap and option book in Zurich. After a stint in Luxembourg, he moved to an interest derivative broker called Finex before joining J.P. Morgan in London in financial institution and corporate derivatives marketing where he spent five years before moving to Goldman Sachs as a managing director in Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities in 2004. Bollinger was made partner while working in Hong Kong in 2010, two years after the Lehman Brothers collapse.

“The Global Financial Crisis was one of the biggest moments for the financial industry and reverberated throughout the structured products market,” he says. “It was a formative event. The regulatory changes that followed the Global Financial Crisis – TLAC , Mifid, Priips - changed the structured products market completely. The industry had to re-build from its foundations.”

Turning our attention to the US market, as the number of custom and proprietary underlyings increases, we used our StructrPro tool to look at the performance of two of the most popular underlying indices in the US market developed by investment banks.

Proprietary indices are an important alternative and two of the most popular choices are momentum strategy indices - the JPMorgan ETF Efficiente 5 Index and the Goldman Sachs Momentum Builder Multi-Asset Class Index. There are over 1100 products linked to each of these strategies with a similar split over live and matured products. The performance statistics shown here were taken from the US structured product analysis service StructrPro.com. StructrPro can be used to analyse live and matured products from the SRP database using analytics powered by FVC.

For both indices, the return pa. of the matured products is higher than for the live products. All returns are relatively modest due to the low volatility of the underlyings themselves and the capital protection afforded by the most common payoff types (protected growth and growth autocall). Live products can have an in-life valuation of below par which explains the negative return shown here however if held to maturity these products would pay at least full capital.

This year, we mark the 20th anniversary of SRP. The structured products industry has been in a perennial state of change since its inception. The seismic shifts seen in our industry happened because of specific decisions and market events that helped the structured products market to carve its own space in the financial markets.

As we celebrate 20 years of SRP, we look back at 20 of the top stories that defined and shaped the structured products market throughout two decades of change, disruption and innovation.

The first entry in the series was in 2003. Companies seeking comprehensive information on the structured retail product market can now access a new, independent, on-line service designed to report on the UK market. SRP provides a database of over 1,100 individual products from more than 100 companies, dating back to 1997 and representing sales of over £20bn. Analysis of the structured retail products market in 2002 from SRP shows that the market grew by 15% from 2001 with gross sales volumes increasing from £5.47bn in 2001 to £6.27bn in 2002.

SRP last week launched the first part of its latest ESG report. Indexing has become an area of constant development and innovation in the structured products market with new products and entrants. The SRP ESG report is the first of several chapters that will be released throughout the year coinciding with our events and will be incorporated to the second iteration of SRP’s Index Report which will be published at the end of the year.

Click in the link to get your copy of the SRP ESG Report.

Image: iStock