Today’s prevailing narrative is quite simple: heightened demands for a transparent view of investment risks are putting considerable pressure on private equity and real estate fund managers, and their service providers.
“There has been a lot of fund activity in Luxembourg this year focused on private equity and real estate. It’s an area of growing investor demand. They are looking for different options now and ways for investing that go beyond hedge funds,” observes Jesper Steiness, director of business development EMEA at Advent (Luxembourg).
It is fair to say that alternative fund managers are feeling a degree of regulatory fatigue. Every month, it seems, there are updates, developments and areas of additional compliance. But whilst on the surface this can appear overwhelming, digging a little deeper reveals that service providers are positioning themselves to offer a more complete set of value-added solutions.
There is no experience as the one gained in the front lines. The fund industry struggles with changing regulation, and those companies whose business model is based on providing reporting services know best that the devil lies in the detail. The following are a number of observations after 12 months of report production and filing of the Annex IV Transparency Reports of AIFMD.
A true sign of how well a fund jurisdiction is doing is the level of growth, not just in new fund formations, but asset growth within administration firms. The onset of the AIFMD has opened up a new range of services for administrators, in particular by providing a Depo Lite solution to managers running non-EU funds.
By Kavitha Ramachandran, Maitland - As the alternative investment market matures, investors are increasingly demanding far more information and transparency from fund managers in return for their capital. Transparency is the new name of the game. In this regard, the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) may be viewed as a single piece of regulation, but its ultimate aims are more or less in line with other regulatory changes such as MiFID II/MiFIR and PRIPS. There will come a point where the reporting and transparency requirements demanded under the AIFMD will become the minimum accepted standard needed to attract investors.
PwC Luxembourg is the leading professional services firm in the country with around 2,400 people. Similarly, its Real Estate and Infrastructure team is the largest multidisciplinary team of specialists in the Grand Duchy with more than 250 experts supporting global real estate managers; these range from tax advisers and engineers to auditors and fund accountants.