Known as ‘Dino’ to his friends and colleagues, Mohieddine Kronfol has a transatlantic background after attending high school in North America and pursuing a master’s degree in business administration in Beirut, Lebanon.
He recalls how in 1996, the Lebanese capital was “believe it or not, vying for pole position as a regional financial centre. It seems very strange today but, at the time Rafic Hariri was prime minister, Lebanon had long come out of a civil war, it had a strong banking system, a long history of financial services and investment banking markets were opening up.”
Kronfol got a job in Beirut with one of the region’s first pan-Arab investment banks and later moved to Dubai, where he was a founder of what he describes as one of the first independent asset management companies in the region, Algebra Capital.
His involvement with Franklin Templeton Investments came when it acquired a 25% stake in Algebra in 2007 and completed a full acquisition in 2011, subsequently rebranding the asset management company as Franklin Templeton Investments Middle East.
“It is encouraging that the organisation has achieved some scale and has some diversification in client type and location in such a short period of time.”
Fast forward
Fast forward to today, and Kronfol is chief investment officer of global sukuk and Mena (Middle East and North Africa) fixed income at Franklin Templeton Investments and the lead manager of the Franklin Global Sukuk and Franklin GCC Bond funds.
The Franklin Global Sukuk Fund was launched in September 2012 and the Franklin GCC Bond Fund almost one year later in the following August.
Kronfol says shariah (Islamic law) compliant assets have grown quickly, with mandates awarded of more than of $1.2bn (£799m, €1.1bn) as at 30 September. To put this in the context, the wider group is running at around $800bn.
“It is encouraging that the organisation has achieved some scale and has some diversification in client type and location in such a short period of time.”
He says the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) represents a significant part of the global sukuk (Islamic bond) market, more than two-thirds of the international market five years ago, but that this percentage has fallen over time as more countries are getting involved in the shariah-compliant space.
“We felt that our presence here in Dubai and in Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur gave us a unique position to be able to tap into these opportunities. We have been building on that ever since.”
In geographic terms, the global fund has exposure to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at more than 35% of the total, followed by Malaysia and then Saudi Arabia.
“We said from day one we would objectively research the entire global sukuk landscape. We have one of the biggest teams focused on this space, and we are beginning to see that universe pushing out to countries such as Turkey, Hong Kong and Ireland, the UK, Africa, South Africa and Nigeria.”
