Twelve Capital targets investors in Australia & New Zealand

Specialist ILS fund manager Twelve Capital has announced a new partnership with Sydney based capital advisory and fund placement consultancy based Allen Partners, to help in expanding its distribution reach into Australia and New Zealand.

The Zurich headquartered insurance-linked securities (ILS) and reinsurance linked investment manager is seeking to engage with new sources of investors, by reaching outside of the more familiar Europe for its fundraising efforts.

Part of this strategy will be developing opportunities in the Australian and New Zealand retirement markets, with the help of Allen Partners.

The region is home to some of the most sophisticated institutional investors, while considerable growth of the superannuation and pension funds assets is is expected in the region over the next 10 to 15 years.

Already the 4th largest pool of retirement savings in the world, Twelve Capital expects that its specialised insurance and reinsurance linked investment offerings will be well received by investors looking for alternative investment opportunities outside the Asia-Pacific region.

Allen Partners is a specialist capital advisory and fund placement consultancy based in Sydney, Australia.

Formed in 2009, Allen Partners senior team has deep relationships across the Australian and New Zealand investor communities and has successfully helped establish a range of differing specialised and alternative asset manager strategies in the region.

Philipp Graf, Managing Director, Global Distribution of Twelve Capital, commented on the news, “Our partnership with Allen Partners will enable us to bring our specialised capabilities to investors based in Australia and New Zealand. The insurance sector is typically under-researched by asset managers and banks which creates significant investment opportunities for Twelve Capital’s clients in asset classes such as Catastrophe Bonds, Insurance-Linked Securities and Insurance Debt. With Allen Partners’ local knowledge, we should be able to establish a presence in these markets and offer our differentiated investment capabilities to a range of institutional investors.”

Craig Gribble, Managing Partner of Allen Partners, Sydney, added, “We know that our investor base is always seeking specialist funds to diversify their risk and expand their opportunity set, particularly as Australia’s pool of retirement funds has greatly exceeded local opportunities. We believe that Twelve Capital’s investment strategies can provide this due to their low correlation to traditional asset class allocations and Twelve’s large team of research and product specialists focused on these under-researched, complex and sometimes misunderstood products. The ever-increasing participation of capital markets and institutional investors into the global insurance/reinsurance industry is an important and exciting thematic. We look forward to working with Twelve Capital across Australia and New Zealand.”

Twelve Capital manages roughly $4 billion of ILS and other reinsurance linked assets currently and recently said that it is to focus on the growth of its own-brand ILS funds.

Accessing the super and pension funds in Australia and New Zealand can provide a source of diversified capital growth for ILS managers and some of the funds there are very familiar with reinsurance linked strategies.

Hence, Twelve Capital’s broad range of ways to access the returns of the re/insurance sector through cat bonds, private ILS, debt, and equity may prove an interesting offering to some of the investors in the region.