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InterSec 250: The changing face of asset management

InterSec 250: The changing face of asset management

So far, Australia has emerged from the Asia crisis remarkably unscathed. In fact, it seems like just the right sort of stable market for European investors seeking diversification. Australian borrowers are responding by getting on the euro issuance bandwagon. Albert Smith reports.

The news of an alliance between the sleepy London Stock Exchange and the Deutsche Börse, its biggest European rival, surprised the market. Eventually the partners hope to bring in other bourses. That pleased the Dutch but the French felt slighted - they'd been courting the Germans too. The devil will be in the detail: the Germans let slip that they thought their settlement system would win out, much to the chagrin of London's CrestCo and the LSE's derivatives counterpart Liffe. So will it be London-on-the-Main or Frankfurt an der Themse? Antony Currie reports.

Overgrown and full of deadwood

One of Germany's great tacticians and diplomatic fixers, Horst Köhler is poised to step up from German domestic sagas to an international arena as the next president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

A smell of disinfected newness lingers in the London office of Bank Austria Creditanstalt Futures. Launched on June 1, it's the first venture in the western hemisphere to use the recently merged bank's name and corporate red is much in evidence; from the trendily designed logos emblazoning the walls to the leather sofa in reception.

Choudri Mueen Afzal, Pakistan's new secretary of finance, talks the language of reform - thinner government, improved tax collection and a sharper financial sector. People like him will carry Pakistan to the next stage of development

Mergers and acquisitions continue to transform the asset-management business, as the latest InterSec Research Corporation ranking of the largest 250 non-US asset managers shows. The table provides a snapshot of the industry at year-end 1998 and many of the most eye-catching changes from the year before - both in terms of managers' positions in the ranking and the value of assets under management - are the result of industry consolidation. UBS rises from third to second position, leapfrogging Groupe Axa of France. In 1997, the old UBS had a total of $485.5 million under management. By the end of 1998, following consummation of the merger of Swiss Bank Corp and UBS, the new UBS had $1,144.5 billion under management, putting it closer to perennial ranking leader Kampo of Japan which had $1,685.4 billion under management at the end of 1998. In a recent interview with Euromoney, UBS chief executive Marcel Ospel underlined the bank's appetite for expanding in private banking, an asset management-type business, both by building and through acquisition.

With its tall ancient trees and exquisite lawns studded with marble antiques, the Nakkastepe headquarters of Koc Holdings look like an Ottoman aristocratic home from which the lord of the manor is absent on a prolonged journey. Situated on a tall hill on the Asian side of Istanbul, far from the madding crowds of Europe's noisiest city, the walled compound exudes an old-world peace.

What species of bank will fill the ecological niches of the new Europe? Noel Gordon describes the type of creatures - value capturers, optimizers, consolidators and innovators - who may survive.