Mobey Forum’s Guide to Risk Management in Mobile Financial Services

This presentation will show how investing in emerging markets, along with investing in other alternative asset classes and individual alternative assets, can substantially increase portfolio returns while reducing portfolio risk. There have been substantial changes to the investment climate that have come about as a result of the pandemic and various economic and social disruptions. Yet, fundamentally, the art and science of investment has not changed. We will look at some of the opportunities that have been created in this new investment environment and how we can invest to capitalize on these opportunities. Here are some of the topics which will be discussed:

• What Are Emerging Markets
• What Are Alternative Investments
• Investing in Emerging Market Funds
• The Wealth Creation Pyramid
• Finding Investment Opportunities in Equity Crowdfunding
• Investing in Emerging Market Government Debt
• Generation of Cash Flow
• Preservation of Capital
• Asset Appreciation
• Portfolio Diversification
• High Overall Returns
• Correlations with Other Asset Classes – Low Correlation, Non-correlated, Negative Correlation

While many organization and individuals are interested in investing in emerging markets, most do not fully understand how various segments and strategies vary in the exposure they provide. Before committing to a strategy, it’s vital that investors do their due diligence to understand what their options are, how they differ, and which will deliver the exposure they think they're getting, as well as the optimal results. In this webinar, Peter Marber will clarify what various strategies really mean in order to enable a true risk/reward analysis on the part of EM investors.

Presented by Peter Marber, CIO for Emerging Markets at Aperture Investors

About Peter;

Peter Marber is the Chief Investment Officer for Emerging Markets at Aperture Investors, leading the New World Opportunities strategy. For over 30 years, Peter has professionally invested billions of dollars for many of the world’s largest companies at firms including Loomis, Sayles & Company, HSBC, and Wasserstein & Co.

Though a globally-recognized authority on emerging market economies, Peter landed on Wall Street not because of his love for financial markets, but rather due to his fascination with globalization. Peter studies how countries and their markets evolve to develop a deep understanding of emerging market dynamics. He passes along his curiosity, knowledge and passion as a professor at NYU, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Columbia, as well as through his writings on globalization, emerging markets, and higher education.

Peter earned his B.A. at Johns Hopkins, his M.I.A. from Columbia, and his Ph.D from The University of Cambridge. He is an avid composer and guitarist and lives in New York City with his family.

Initially aptly named “Scaling: From BAD (Big Avoidable Disaster) to BEST (Begin Everything with Systems Thinking), today's talk will specifically focus on Emerging Market opportunities and risk factors that need to be taken into account as impact is taking on an ever-larger role in top investor diligence filters.


Taught by Tami Kesselman, a pioneer and thought leader in impact investing, known internationally for her ability to identify business model risks often overlooked by others, this session will be an exclusive emerging markets version of one of her most popular Harvard Business School talks which is about to become a 7 week “Mini Impact MBA" online Exec Ed course! Based on her proprietary SMARTimpact™ heuristics diligence framework, the session delves into insights from analysis of more than three decades of for-profit, non-profit, government, and investor business models that seemed successful on the surface but had systemic flaws that should have been flagged from the beginning and ultimately led to underperformance or worse!


In this 60-minute session, you will have an exclusive opportunity to learn some of the core principles covered in the HBS lecture as Tami teaches you the specific filter questions you need to include to de-risk your investments. She will show you how to find previously unidentified potential unintended consequences as you evaluate deals or structure your own. You will be able to put to these insights to work immediately to improve both financial and impact results. Whether you are an angel investor, VC/PE, entrepreneur, corporate sustainability executive or a foundation program officer, you will come away viewing diligence completely differently as Tami takes you through multiple case examples of good intentions gone wrong!

At over 12 Trillion Dollars in GDP, China is the world’s 2nd largest economy. It is home to 8 of the top 20 tech giants, it is a leader in exports, and is second only to the US in exports.

After years of unprecedented growth, china has begun to slow down. It is easy to point to the trade war with the US as the driver of this slowdown. But we need to look deeper.

This webinar will provide the Institutional investors and financial advisers interested in emerging markets, with:

An overview on China’s domestic policy in stimulating trade
An analysis of the 3 veins of the trade war
How to find opportunity in the market
Filtering the signal versus the noise
Q&A

The world is emerging from the Covid fog but the new question is not only “how much is already priced in to markets?” It is also “when things get back to normal who will gain the most?”

The Emerging Market potential is enormous and the chances to profit are the same. However even if things go right for the Emerging Market economy the usual markets may not follow suit. James finds a way to turn the odds more in the investors favour by assessing what could go right, what could go wrong and what should benefit regardless.

James will run through each major market’s pros and cons and look at the key funds to watch that will help investors gain the best outcome.

With Bloomberg predicting thematic ETFs could reach $300 billion in 5 years[1], the outlook for ETFs is positive. Asset managers, banks and insurance companies are looking at ETFs as a serious strategic opportunity that will enable them to grow and meet the needs of modern investors.

We’ll be joined by Hector McNeil, an ETF veteran and Co-CEO of Europe’s first white-label ETF provider, to discuss the growth of ETFs and what investors can expect to see in the near future.

We will also be joined by North American asset managers from the cloud computing, healthcare innovation, online retail, digital infrastructure and medical cannabis sectors to discuss the growing adoption of ETFs and the outlook for their respective sectors.

In this webinar we will explore:
- The growth of ETFs in Europe
- ETF liquidity
- Thematic ETFs
- Outlook

Speakers:
Hector McNeil, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of HANetf
Anthony Ginsberg, Managing Director, GinsGlobal Investment Management
Chris Versace, Chief Investment Officer, Tematica Research
Greg Taylor, Portfolio Manager, Purpose Investments
Jane Edmondson, Co-Founder & Principal, EQM Indexes

With ESG ETFs getting a significant share of the newly created ETF landscape, there is some pretty important differences among the different ETF providers that can be fairly difficult to navigate. With the addition of a much larger offer of Fixed Income ETFs, one can now build pretty robust and attractive diversified and Multi-Asset ETFs.

Nutmeg has been a pioneer in ESG investing among digital wealth managers in Europe and has currently more than 25% of its asset and customers in ESG.

US Large Cap investing has proven a particular difficult market to generate alpha.

The VanEck Vectors Morningstar US Wide Moat ETF has generated significantly outperformance compared to the S&P 500 in most years since inception in 2015.

Join this webcast as Martijn Rozemuller and Brandon Rakszawski explain the underlying philosophy and investment process.

Speakers:
Martijn Rozemuller, CEO, VanEck
Brandon Rakszawski, Senior ETF Product Manager, VanEck

Chinese stocks produced one of the strongest returns of major equity markets in 2020, a welcome result for those betting on China’s rapid economic growth and low correlation with other global markets. On top of a compelling beta story, roughly 85% of trading in China is done by amateur retail investors, leading to rampant mispricings and the potential for intelligent strategies to yield large behavioral alpha. At the same time, mainland China’s markets carry an array of special risks, from questionable accounting and often confusing regulations to state-owned companies with weak governance and poor performance—the quintessential value traps.

As China’s economy becomes “too big to ignore”, ETF investors looking for exposure will need navigate these unique challenges and opportunities. In this talk, Phillip Wool, Rayliant’s Head of Investment Solutions and a portfolio manager of Rayliant’s Quantamental China Equity ETF (RAYC), will explain why active management is an essential piece of the investing puzzle for Chinese stocks.

Phillip will cover the pitfalls of passive ETF design in a retail-dominated market with a nuanced investment landscape, and explain how an active approach to building ETFs for China A shares manages risk and exploits behavioral bias to fully capture the benefits Chinese equities have to offer.

Is 2021 the year of actively managed bond funds?

The growth in choices of bond funds ranging from passive to active continues. What you need to know about the myths and realities of the bond market and fund performance.

Join this discussion as we cover:
-The risks in manager selection
-The hard choice to make: active management or passive?
-Bond funds or ETFs: strengths & weaknesses of both
- When bonds go from boring to bad

Traditionally, portfolio construction sees diversification as a problem best solved by a basic mix of asset classes split up by region or country. However the modern world we live in is very different from the one in which these concepts were formed. Geopolitical issues heighten macro-economic effects. Technology has helped reduced home bias in portfolios but also increased global correlations materially.

At the same time, traditional portfolio hedges yield little in way of return but still subject investors to risk. In this talk, Chris Marshall, head of Investment Strategy at Dragon IM will outline how ETFs and their easy-to-implement offering of style and factor diversification provide an important tool in the new era of strategic portfolio construction.

Sustainable Investing developed from a niche product a few years ago into mainstream investing over the last two years. During and after the COVID crash in 2020, ESG ETF´s attracted billions of inflows as ESG indices outperformed “conventional” equity indices.

Join this webinar to find out more about:

*Different approaches to ESG- and Low Carbon investments and their drivers of risk and return with a focus on well-known factor exposures.
*Passive strategies with a low tracking error to traditional benchmarks and the question, if they can add economic value beyond “doing good”.
*Data challenges in ESG and the risks of quantitative ESG strategies of index providers delivered via ETF´s.
*Factor Investing in combination with carbon footprint reduction and if this combination can deliver a better risk-/return trade-off than passive approaches via ETF or active Long Only-strategies

The Global Economy at the beginning of this year was hit by arguably two black swan events. The collapse of OPEC-Russia cooperation on oil production has triggered a financial market shock. This event was however dwarfed by a coronavirus-induced growth shock on an unprecedented scale. Theoretically, we should have been prepared.

We live in an era of rapidly changing global landscapes and local environments. Viruses with RNA as their genetic material can quickly adapt to and exploit these varying conditions” – This and similar quotes, which were warning us even more explicitly about a potential pandemic, we could have read in books published already five or even 10 years ago. And indeed the risk – the “spread of infectious diseases” - featured as second on the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk by impact register in 2015. Yet, just a year later it went down to 8th position and has featured even lower than that (in 10th place) in the last 3 years. 'Climate action failure' and 'weapons of mass distraction' risks took over the prominent positions on the risk register.

But how are companies preparing for and hedging against low probability, high impact risks?

Should black swans events be hedged against or is this an ‘opportunity’ to re-design business models?

Can these risks be hedged and/or insured? At what cost (if at all)?

Who ‘owns’ these risks in the organisation and how can Boards add the most value?

Are issues like Climate Preparedness put aside or are they take on a new meaning?



These and many more aspects we will be discussing with our excellent panel:

Andrew Gates – CEO – Macquarie Bank Europe
Ioannis Ioannou – Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship – London Business School
John Coley – Head of Risk Consulting Practice for EMEA – Norton Rose Fulbright
Nazim Osmancik – Chief Risk Officer, Energy Trading - Centrica
Moderated by Dana Hanby – Managing Director – ESG Nexus