Interview of Gilles Glicenstein

The Group’s Asset Management business has adopted a new brand called the BNP Paribas Investment Partners designed to meet the needs of the changing markets. Today we discuss this new branding with Gilles Glicenstein, CEO of BNP Paribas Asset Management and Head of BNP Paribas Investment Partners. Gilles Glicenstein, hello!

1/ Why have you created BNP Paribas Investment Partners?

Actually we have created a group of asset managers that now constitutes BNP Paribas Investment Partners a number of years ago because we were very early aware of the demand of the client who was very focused on specialization, quality, open architecture and some instances. Therefore, if you wanted to be competitive in that changing world, you needed to be more specialized, even if it would require association with partners or specialized companies with a high reputation. That’s what we did over the years. We now have around fifteen partners working with BNP. That makes us a powerful group able to respond to all of the customers needs.

2/ What investment activities does the brand include?

We cover a wide range of investment specialties from passive to active management, form alternative to more traditional funds management, hedge funds, private equity, currency overlay. So we’ve been very early focused on what appeared to us to be the new trends in terms of demand. Just to give you a couple of examples, in the past five years we’ve invested in the currency overlay management that we have now with OAM, the number one in Europe. We’ve invested in funds of hedge funds with Fauchier Partners, which is probably one of the highest ranked hedge funds managers in the UK. In the trackers, the passive funds management side, we entered that market only two and a half years ago and we’re now number three in Europe.

3/ What are its strong points?

We have a number of specialties; we have a number of strong points. It’s difficult to mention all of them because we have more than a dozen of products. We’d rather specialized our resources in a limited number of products than try to do everything. We try to be very competitive at the very highest level possible.

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