Retaining the most conservative investors who have entered the world of investment funds in recent yearstaking advantage of the rise in interest rates and, therefore, the possibility of entering maturity products, those that had Spanish or Italian public debt as their underlying, with attractive yields. This is the challenge that Spanish managers will face for next year, as announced by the leaders of the main Spanish managers during their speech at the Madrid Investor Networking Day (MIND), organized by Épika.
An exercise, that of 2025, in which will happen maturity of more than 25 billion euros in this type of vehiclerecalled Ana Martín de Santa Olalla, general director of CaixaBank AM, to which will also be added the punctual arrival of numerous Treasury bonds, which caused long queues at the Bank of Spain to buy them.
“The big challenge is to transform savers into investors”, emphasized Nicolás Barquero, CEO of Santander AM Spain, who highlighted that in the case of the Cantabrian entity this involves support approximately 100,000 customers who joined as new participants in this process these years in these funds with a very conservative profile. “And the simplest way to achieve this is to use discretionary management portfolios,” he stressed, because “either they assume more risk or it will be difficult to obtain profitability,” knowing , as he recalled, that only 19% of investment funds are assets with variable income.
For Martín de Santa Olalla, portfolio management is the most effective way to “support” clients in this transformation process, at a time when it will be necessary to add more risk “in a diversified way” to gain profitability in a context of decline. interest rates.
The head of the CaixaBank management company explained that the entity already has a third of its investors in discretionary management portfolios, a trend that will continue. “Clients are increasingly turning to discretionary management and delegating investment decisions to advisors,” he stressed. An advisory process that the Catalan entity is promoting with the launch of the GPS Advisory service.
Jaime Lázaro, Head of Asset Management and Global Wealth at BBVA AM, highlighted that he is It is necessary to respect the risk profiles of investors and provide careful advicediversifying portfolios very well. According to him, the alleged conservatism of the Spanish investor is not higher than that of other countries and he gave the example of the bank’s Latin American clients, who, in a context of lower interest rates high, did not need to seek riskier assets such as yield, even though they are more exposed to stocks.
Financial planning
For Lázaro, it is essential to introduce the concept of investment goals in clients financial planning in a context where there is no sign of risk of interruption of the growth cycle, as long as portfolios are well diversified on a global scale to benefit from capital gains.
Regarding the emergence of artificial intelligence, the leaders of Spanish management companies highlighted the revolution that this will represent in a sector like asset management, in which personalized solutions can be adopted for each investor, taking into account aspects such as data protection or cybersecurity. “It will be a useful tool to advise him, but not to replace him,” said Nicolás Barquero. And this will allow “to reach more clients to help them invest without them thinking that it is a subject reserved for those who know or the richest”, concluded Jaime Lázaro, for whom this will mean offering a service of better quality but not to the detriment of recommending it. human.
