Credit Suisse’s Insurance Linked Strategies team has its first UCITS catastrophe bond fund offering, after hiring the team that ran the Lombard Odier cat bond strategy and merging its fund into a new Credit Suisse fund product.
The arrangement sees the UCITS catastrophe bond fund that had been launched by Lombard Odier Investment Managers (LOIM), the asset management arm of Swiss private banking group Lombard Odier, moving over to Credit Suisse along with its portfolio management team.
Lombard Odier had launched the cat bond fund back in 2016, but we understand the strategy had never really gained the scale needed to become a significant offering for the private bank.
Now, the the UCITS compliant ‘Lombard Odier Funds – CAT Bonds’ has been merged into a newly created structure named ‘CS Investments Funds 4 – Credit Suisse (Lux) Cat Bond Fund’ as of January 18th 2021.
The new Credit Suisse (Lux) Cat Bond Fund will adopt a similar investment objective and strategy as the former ‘Lombard Odier Funds – Cat Bonds’, with no significant changes for current investors in the UCITS cat bond fund strategy.
Former Lombard Odier employees and portfolio managers of the cat bond fund Gregor Gawron and Marc Brogli have now both joined Credit Suisse Insurance Linked Strategies in portfolio management roles and will continue to cover the new ‘Credit Suisse (Lux) Cat Bond Fund’.
The Credit Suisse ILS team sees the new launch as a complementary offering to its existing range of ILS investment products, with a UCITS regulated catastrophe bond product that has a track record of more than four years and offers its investors weekly liquidity.
Niklaus Hilti, Head of ILS at Credit Suisse Insurance Linked Strategies, said that, “We are extremely delighted to have Gregor and Marc on board – they bring a long and deep experience.”
The cat bond fund had around $96 million of assets at the end of December 2020 before this move to Credit Suisse, according to Artemis’ data on ILS funds and their managers.
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