«We have a unique business model, charac­te­rized by excellent customer service and tailor-made solutions»

28.12.2021

Ms. Daurelle, how did you start your career and what are your main objec­tives as MFEX Chief Executive Officer (CEO) as you lead the integration of the two companies?

I began my career in the insu­rance sector, where I refined the strategic partner­ship with one of CNP’s main distri­bution net­works and boosted its commercial deve­lopment. Shortly after 2000, I joined Euro­clear, a globally recog­nized Financial Market infra­struc­ture that specia­lizes in post-trade services, where I was appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of three of its Central Secu­rities Depo­si­tories (CSD) - Euro­clear Belgium, Euro­clear France and Euro­clear Neder­land. During my six years as CEO, I worked to conso­lidate these three national CSDs onto a single platform.

Those initia­tives that I have contri­buted to at Euro­clear along with the expe­rience I have built over the years, have played a role in my nomi­nation to lead the inte­gration of MFEX into the Euro­clear group, and to ensure the smooth transition of not only the techno­logy but also the cultures of the two companies, which I am very pleased to say has been going very well.

My role as CEO encompasses servicing a much bigger family of clients, now that we can plug the two plat­forms together. Our plan is to provide the transpa­rency that MFEX has consis­tently offered to fund mana­gement companies and distri­butors for all scopes of acti­vities. My efforts will be directed towards ele­vating the client expe­rience with our comple­mentary services and capabi­lities, while bringing together the scalabi­lity of the Euro­clear plat­forms and the flexi­bility and tailor-made solutions that MFEX offers, to remain, together one of the world’s leading Funds platforms.

What is the new combined company’s global strategy?

MFEX and Euroclear have been working together for a long time, but now, thanks to this partner­ship we can make full use of our compli­mentary approaches and capabi­lities to maxi­mize our compe­titive advan­tages and further­more elevate the customer’s expe­rience in the financial market.

As more clients outsource their funds’ processing activities to market infra­struc­tures and plat­forms, we see a bigger role for us to support the sector’s growth to meet the market’s ever-growing demands and reduce legal and regu­latory comple­xities of today. Therefore, the strategy will have to encompass different criteria. Moreover, we plan for this partner­ship to further­more rein­force our presence and value propo­sition in existing European markets, especially in Switzer­land, France, as well as expand our inter­national foot­print. Tuning into different markets will provide the proxi­mity we need in order to meet specific market demands and tailor our product offerings accordingly.

Besides having a big ecosystem and a strong network of fund mana­gement companies and distri­butors, we plan to develop new services together. This will help us create an envi­ronment for other players to be able to plug in as well, and not just distri­butors and fund mana­gement companies. This will further enhance clients’ expe­rience and will help overcome the challenges of a fragmented market.

We will leverage the comple­men­tarity of services between the two entities to produce signi­ficant value through revenue synergies and combine our missions under the name «MFEX by Euro­clear». This new offer is well-posi­tioned to opti­mize business oppor­tu­nities in partner­ship with the clients in order to enhance our overall offering.

Focus on Swiss market: what is the local strategy?

Switzerland is considered as key in the funds industry both in terms of assets and customers (rated fourth in terms of assets in Luxem­bourg domi­ciled funds at end of September 2021, repre­senting 14.1 percent - namely 789 bn Euros - after the United States, United Kingdom and Germany according to the Commission de Surveil­lance du Secteur Financier).

With offices in Geneva and Zurich, we are looking to strengthen our foot­print in this market. We count amongst our clients in the Swiss market, some of the biggest private banks as well as major players in online trading. Most of these clients have signed with us over the past two years.

Our office in Zurich has welcomed a new employee which rein­forces our local presence. This creates a signi­ficant oppor­tunity to continue to leverage our solid foundation built in the region over the past years with fund distri­butors as well as asset managers. Consi­dering the importance of Zurich’s financial center which houses major banks and insti­tu­tional clients - among them insurers and pension funds - we expect to increase our customer base thanks to our unique model, charac­te­rized by excellent customer service and tailor-made solutions.

We are also delighted to announce that we recently opened a repre­sen­tative office in Basel enhancing our market cove­rage. With a strong customer base of private banks and insurers well estab­lished in this region, this new expansion offers proxi­mity to our customer segment, allowing us to best under­stand and answer their needs locally, which is highly appre­ciated.

We continue to build upon our ope­rations in Switzerland, having even broader ambitions to explore oppor­tu­nities and to extend our services to both German and Austrian markets. The robustness and well-estab­lished processes of Euro­clear’s trading platform coupled with both the agi­lity and tailor­made oriented solutions of MFEX in the distri­bution chain segment, will offer a strong and efficient solution to enter these new markets success­fully.

What products do you consider as the most promising in the next years?

We will invest in digital and data services, such as providing data ana­lytics up to the end-investor level and offering digital compliance tools. Consi­dering both increasing regu­lation requi­rements and real appe­tite from asset managers and fund distri­butors for data flows and data accuracy, we are signi­fi­cantly improving our data offering to address those needs.

Our existing data service offering for fund mana­gement companies and fund distri­butors is today being enhanced with new modules. The strategy is two-fold. We are first implementing Arti­ficial Intelli­gence (AI) solutions across all business lines, in order to enrich the data flow captures on our plat­form and unleash powerful economies of scale.

Beyond these considerable advances in data quality driven by AI, we are also focusing on market intelli­gence tools that will allow both fund mana­gement companies and distri­butors to improve investment decisions based on trends and bench­marking. Investment trends including both region and product parameters and insights are key in terms of distribution strategy for our partners.

In addition, providing data can also help investors in tracking ESG strategies and whether it is in line with their principles of avoiding «green­washing». This mission is aligned with the MFEX by Euro­clear corpo­rate strategy of being a syste­mically important, resilient, and robust infra­structure at the heart of the financial industry’s ecosystem. Data is not the only domain we are focusing on. Compliance is also a matter we want to help our partners with.

With our independent «Reg-Tech Global Fund Watch», we are offering digital solu­tions and real impro­vement in terms of user expe­rience. Compliance can be syno­nymous with heavy and laborious processes; this online solution allows a client to both access and retrieve required infor­mation in a few clicks. Market parti­cipants are no longer subjected to long collection and disse­mi­nation of documents processes and can focus on the deve­lopment of both value-added acti­vities and profi­tability - largely charac­terized with low margins and more complex regu­latory requi­rements. «Global Fund Watch» also offers screening and broadcast functions to answer target market related requi­rements. In its wide offer panel, «Global Fund Watch» is consi­dered a real faci­litator and time­saving actor for both asset managers and fund distri­butors who are in need of such service offering.

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