– New joiner: Our Due Diligence and Fund Monitoring services team strengthens with a new addition: Pierre Mérillon. Pierre has 25 years’ experience in financial markets. He spent the first 10 years of his career in London in Debt Capital Markets structuring bespoke solutions for institutional investors at Top Investment Banks. Pierre then moved to the buy-side spending the next 15 years at Darius Capital, an affiliate of Natixis, based in Paris. His mandates encompassed operational and investment Due Diligence, portfolio construction as well as fund monitoring and risk management. Pierre studied Applied Mathematics and graduated from prestigious ENSAE, the National School of Statistics and Economics in Paris. This is a great addition the team as K Funds ‘Due Diligence & Fund Monitoring Services’ is gaining momentum.

– As the year kick-off, we are delighted as one of our asset managers is nominated for 2 Awards including Best European Asset Management Company at the European Funds Trophy, the ceremony rewarding the Best Funds and Asset Managers in Europe.

– New Partnership: we are delighted to announce a partnership with one of the largest, most experienced and talented Latin American asset manager part of a $55bn group. In 2019, the group was awarded World’s Best Investment Bank in Emerging Markets, but also Best in Latin America, Best in Brazil and Best in Chile. The Asset Management arm runs $30bn in the region with many offices across LatAm (incl Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru…), close to 30 investment professionals and several funds, including Ucits with great track records. The firm is very active on ESG since 2015 and a UN PRI Signatory of course.

– We will be hosting a Lunch in Paris on January 29th focusing on Latin America with an exceptional guestspeaker.

– Our newly launched ‘K Funds Due Diligence & Monitoring services’ unit is starting well with a potential experienced new joiner in February.

– Our team will be attending the 9th Annual Funds Congress next February 6th in London.

2019 has been an incredible journey for K Funds with new partnerships (Quality Growth and Equity Thematics managers), 4 new funds, numerous roadshows & events, new investors, strong performances, awards, ‘ESG Globes’, inflows, new joiners (Paris and Zurich) and new projects in preparation for 2020. 

Our newly launched Due Diligence service is getting traction and we are glad with all the queries received. The team is headed by 2 highly experienced professionals and we are keen to grow that part of the business.

This month we were delighted to launch K Women, an initiative to connect women in finance. Our network is made of many talented women around the globe and therefore facilitating interactions between them became an obvious next thing to do. Our ambition is that this initiative will benefit women in their careers and more broadly women in the financial sector. More news as we build this initiative over the coming months.

New Due Diligence service: As more and more firms are externalising this and we were doing this internally, it became obvious to offer a Due Diligence service. The team will be headed by 2 highly experienced professionals: Stéphane Julen, previously PM and Head of Fundamental Hedge Fund Research at Credit Suisse and, Dauphou Edi previously Head of Risk & COO at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Fund Platform. Beyond running themselves multi-assets active allocation strategies, they each bring huge experience in terms of fund analysis from long only to alternatives and from both a quantitative and qualitative standpoint.

We are proud to support modern heroes at French charity ‘La Chaîne de l’Espoir’ (https://www.chainedelespoir.org/en). These people will go to some of the most dangerous places on the globe to provide medical and surgery support for women and children in need.