Santo Borsellino, chief executive of Generali Investments, said on Thursday the company had set itself a target of raising about €8bn (£6.25, $8.9bn) of third-party assets over the next three years.
He said the company had already been able to increase third-party assets under management (AUM) by 16% last year before it sought and received approval to expand into the UK – a move expected to be completed in the next six to eight weeks.
When established, the new UK branch would be the first step of an expansion plan which will also target the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
“We talk mainly to institutional clients so we can’t really avoid being in the UK and the Nordics,” Borsellino told a press briefing in London.
Asian expansion was also on the agenda, Borsellino said, though not just yet.
“There will be a time when we start looking at Asia,” he said.
New group CEO
The asset management expansion was announced as media reports circulated that on Friday that the parent Generali is set to pick a new chief executive on Friday to replace Mario Greco who left the group earlier this year.
The insurer’s Italy country head Philippe Donnet, who spent nearly three decades with French insurer Axa, is the front runner to take the job, the reports said.
Pan-European move
Generali Investments, Italy’s biggest asset manager and one of the top 10 such firms in continental Europe, currently has around €431bn of AUM built up through its operation in three main European market of Italy, France and Germany to which it has more recently added Benelux, Iberian and eastern European nations.
To support its expansion plans Borsellino said the company had recently redesigned its brand, settling on a single winged lion motif and getting rid of 150 other versions of the lion. “We’ve got the lion now,“ he said.
It had also redesigned its product offering with the aim of providing a consistent and risk adjusted returns to third party clients which utilise the company’s long record in managing asset for its insurance business.
“We tend to be very risk management oriented in what we do,” he said.
New products, people
Anna Khazen, newly-appointed head of investments for the company said there were plans to hire more fund managers to support the expansion strategy.
“We’d ideally like to deepen our expertise in the areas where we already have expertise and expand into new thematic funds where we have strong views,” Khazan said. She gave as an example of a thematic theme the ageing population which, as a life insurance company, Generali knows a lot about.
One area the company has excluded from its expansion plans is servicing retail clients or the world of international financial advisers.
”We decided not to get involved in this,” said Andrea Favaloro, head of sales of marketing. “It’s a mature, overcrowded and expensive segment.”
“We will participate in the unit-linked value chain but we will not go for retail business,” he said.
