The latest in funds and investments in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Legal & General
Legal & General Investment Management has launched a retail offering in the Italian market and will offer investors access to its range of investment solutions, available within exchange traded funds, UCITS and other structures.

As part of the Italian launch, Giancarlo Sandrin been appointed as Italy country head for wholesale and retail. He will be based in a newly-opened office in Milan, and report to Simon Hynes, head of retail EMEA distribution at the UK-based firm.

Prior to this Sandrin was at BlackRock, where he was head of asset manager clients for its Italian iShares business. Previously, he held senior positions at the asset management branch of HSBC Investments France, and at MTS, the market in Europe for fixed income trading.

Ossiam
Ossiam, the affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers, has launched an exchange traded fund that replicates returns of environmental, social and governance-themed investments where companies are ranked by machine learning techniques.

The Ossiam World ESG Machine Learning UCITS ETF, to give its full name, aims to deliver the net total return of a selection of equities in global developed markets using a machine learning algorithm that ranks companies according to their ESG and financial potential.

“A clear trend has emerged of large equity investors putting ESG at the core of their allocation decisions. At the same time, progress in artificial intelligence, and the increased depth and quality of data, has enabled us to improve investment processes by incorporating the valuable information embedded in large amounts of ESG data,” Antonio Celeste, head of ESG business development at Ossiam, said.

The ESG filter process used in the strategy strips out firms that have gone through “severe controversies, are involved in controversial weapons business; have significant operations in the tobacco or coal sectors; are excluded by the Norges Bank Investment Management list, and are not compliant with the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact (on ESG principles). Those equities that go through the filter are then screened using machine learning techniques.

JP Morgan Asset Management
JP Morgan Asset Management has launched three exchange traded funds replicating returns from actively managing corporate bonds. 

The following ETFs are now available on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), Deutsche Boerse Xetra and Borsa Italiana: EUR Corporate Bond Research Enhanced Index UCITS ETF; EUR Corporate Bond 1-5yr Research Enhanced Index UCITS ETF; USD Corporate Bond Research Enhanced Index UCITS ETF, and Global Emerging Markets Research Enhanced Index Equity (ESG) UCITS ETF.

JPMAM said the funds offer an alternative to passive corporate bond market investing. “Passive bond ETFs tend to replicate index weights which are determined by the amount of debt outstanding. As a result, passive investing tends to force investors to own the most indebted and most leveraged of issuers without taking into consideration whether these bonds are compensating investors for the amount of credit risk they are taking,” the firm said.

With its active ETFs, the JP Morgan Asset Management said they focus on identifying the most attractive opportunities on a risk adjusted basis so that investors are not unnecessarily exposed to uncompensated risks inherent in passive investing.