New Guernsey based asset management company

Geneva based merchant banking firm, Generation Group, and a leading Canadian asset management group, Arrow Capital Management, have announced a joint venture to create a new asset management company in Guernsey.

Generation Asset Management (G2AM), led by Managing Partners Manual Carrelet and Sixten Eriksson, said it is one of a new generation of asset management houses with an emphasis on growth strategies, upcoming regions and a particular focus on emerging markets. The new firm will have a head office in Guernsey and operations in London and Geneva.

‘The asset management industry has been under attack for being too self interested and delivering too little to clients. Certainly when you look at the returns delivered to investors over the last decade it is not an unreasonable supposition that fees are too high and results too intermittent,’ said Eriksson, who has worked in the asset management and wealth management sectors for more than 15 years.

‘We see a definite disconnect between asset management and their clients. Benchmarks are too often meaningless for clients, index hugging to far too prevalent and transparency is lacking. No one should expect a professional service for free but there is a difference between paying for professional service and not receiving value for money,’ he added.

‘Generation Asset Management aims to deliver results. We are in partnership with out clients with our own savings invested alongside those of our clients. We are seeking to generate cash beating returns whilst minimising risk because that is what out clients want. However, no one can promise to deliver 100% of the time, markets do go down as well as up and inevitably there will be periods where positive returns will be difficult to generate, we will not pretend otherwise.

‘The fund management industry has tried to do things differently, hedge funds and absolute return funds for example, but these products now share tarnished reputations. There was a bandwagon for a time with both these products, an attempt to change things, but those attempts were tarnished by the few that did not fully commit to the changes in style that these products required, which encompasses charging structures and delivering cash beating returns, new ideas that fell in to the asset management bad habits.

‘We have built Generation Asset Management from scratch because we do not wish to replicate these failures by fitting a new approach in to an old existing structure. This is why we are delivering an old idea, actively managed funds that generate cash beating returns for long term investors, in a new way,’ he added.

The company said that G2AM will employ a multi manager approach through its products and that using this method will allow clients to access a multitude of experienced managers and geographies, enjoying the diversification benefits that go alongside this method.

The founders believe that investors should get what they pay for, namely, a truly active investment management strategy that outperforms the benchmark, something which is not achieved by matching indices.