The latest offerings in investments, such as funds and structured products, and other notable developments.

Amundi
European asset manager Amundi has launched the Amundi Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) division to shift some or all the investment functions typically performed by an investment committee on to Amundi and leverage its multi-asset investment platform and other resources. The service will be led by senior advisors with specialised client knowledge in pension funds, insurance, family offices, sovereigns, central banks, corporates, and agencies, the group said.

Opting for an "outsourced chief investment officer" model often benefits smaller family offices and wealth houses as it is expensive to provide such services in-house.

Amundi's new division combines 28 OCIO professionals, some located in Paris, Milan, Munich and Hong-Kong for increased proximity with clients, and around 200 working across the firm’s multi-asset investment platform. The outsourcing will also encompass Amundi's funds and managers selection, analysts and researchers. “Our offering extends all the way to acting as a trusted partner on their investment plans and structures,” Matteo Germano, Amundi's head of multi-asset investment platform, said.

The goal is to help institutional investors reduce costs, improve investments decision-making and provide better visibility and control of overall risks, both in operations and investment, the group said.

“Institutional investors are facing a series of challenges: low interest rates, macro and markets uncertainties, and IT and regulatory pressures. They can outsource this operational investment complexity to Amundi as an OCIO partner and focus on their core business," Laurent Tignard, head of the division, said.

The Crédit Agricole subsidiary, and one of Europe's largest asset managers, has been offering OCIO solutions to external clients since 2009, with roughly €44 billion (£38.5 billion) managed on behalf of external companies.

GAM Investments
GAM Investments, the Zurich-listed group, has launched a sustainable local emerging market bond strategy. This has been developed alongside VBV-Pensionskasse, a pension fund for sustainable investments in Austria. 

VBV has moved a three-digit million investment into the new sustainable solution. The strategy will be managed by GAM’s emerging markets debt team and is the first in a range of sustainable investment strategies the firm plans to launch in 2021, it said in a statement yesterday. 

The strategy seeks to generate long-term financial returns by investing in a way that is sensitive to the impact decision-making may have on society and the environment. The approach combines a tilt to sovereign debt with higher environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores, as defined by its benchmark, the JP Morgan ESG GBI-EM GD Index, with the team’s proprietary investment process.

“We have taken ESG factors into account in our investment process for our local emerging bond strategy for a number of years, purely for their impact on risk-adjusted returns. However, as ESG factors become more efficiently priced in the sovereign debt market, we believe that now is the time for a strategy that targets both a specific ESG tilt and integrates ESG factors from a risk/return perspective,” Paul McNamara, investment director for emerging market debt at GAM, said.

GAM had SFr122 billion ($138.0 billion) as at 31 December 2020.